"Madness, as you know, is like gravity."

"Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don’t have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one. I just do things. I’m a wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s."

The Joker, The Dark Knight

Having now seen The Dark Knight, I have to agree with the general opinion that Heath Ledger does a stellar turn as the Joker. However, it may be too stellar a turn - the Joker's dominance of the movie turns it into something other than a Batman story.

No one that I've spoken to after they've seen the movie makes any reference to the Batman at all. All the comments are about the Joker: as a character, as a performance, as an idea. When The Phantom Menace came out, disgruntled fans did guerilla cuts of the movie without the character of Jar Jar Binks, and I have to wonder how The Dark Knight would play out if someone went through and remove the Batman. What would you have left? It would be a kind of twisted morality play, the Joker versus Harvey Dent, Gotham's white knight, and an almost inevitable turning of that symbol to the sort of insanity and chaos that he has opposed. Normally the Batman acts as an equal counterweight to the Joker, order versus chaos, but in this case he seems overwhelmed by the Joker's glittering madness.

Logic says that credit for the creation of that madness should lie with Jonathon and Christopher Nolan, the screenwriters. After all, an actor is only as good as his material, and so much of the Joker's material is so very quotable. But in this case, the performance so completely suits the material - Heath Ledger gives the Joker a kind of febrile madness completely different from the original "Clown Prince of Crime" version of the character, to the point where Ledger is invisible behind - or within - the role. When we see Jack Nicholson as the Joker, part of the reaction to his performance is the recognition of Nicholson in an uncharacteristic place, whereas Heath Ledge vanishes completely within the smeared, corrupted clown makeup of his Joker.

The New York Post reported that Ledger spent six weeks in virtual isolation as he experimented with the character of the Joker. As part of the process, he is said to have kept a journal of the Joker's thoughts, a document whose appearance in some form or another is inevitable. No one will ever be able to say with any certainty if the performance had any connection with Ledger's death, although personally it seems too much like a convenient news hook rather than a believable tragedy.

And the rest of the cast? I'm sorry to say that I found Christian Bale's performance to be workmanlike, like he was only doing the job he was hired to do. I acknowledge the difficulty of acting behind a cape and cowl, but there are times when his Batman almost feels like a parody, with too much concentration on the gravelly tone of menace. The scenes that he shares with Michael Caine are probably his best, but unfortunately Caine probably has the second best lines in the movie after the Joker's.

Does Batman come in third for dialogue? Sorry, third place goes to Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent. As suggested above, you could easily turn the movie into a struggle between Dent and the Joker, and it's unfortunate that Eckhart and Ledger ended up in the same film. Eckhart could have easily supported an entire plot line with Dent versus Batman, but in this case he ends up as a bit of a sideshow. Oh, and I'm sorry to say that for me, Maggie Gyllenhaal comes across as a placeholder: "Stand here and read these lines - thanks." (I seem to be having a critical summer in terms of female love interests, Glyneth Paltrow also didn't work for me in Iron Man.)

I'm curious as to where they'll go from here. Someone must be kicking themselves about the decision to kill off Two-Face and keep the Joker alive, given how subsequent events have unfolded. It's oddly fitting, somehow - it's almost like some kind of slightly twisted joke...

- Sid

Tradition requires some kind of reference to "Braaaains".

Saturdays tend to be sort of a quiet day for me: usually I do the laundry first thing, catch up on e-mail, and maybe head downtown for a little shopping. Today, as I was walking around in the downtown core, I thought to myself, "Boy, there's a lot more zombies than usual lurching around down here." (And really, there aren't usually that many in the first place, in spite of what my friend Laurie would say about the general population.) Upon returning home, a little investigation on the internet revealed that today was the 2008 Vancouver Zombie Walk. "Oh, well then," I thought, "that explains everything."

The 2008 what?

The first Zombie Walk took place in Sacramento in 2001 as a promotional stunt for a B-movie film festival, and somehow the idea has gone internationally viral since then. For no good reason that I can imagine, Canada appears to score quite highly in terms of zombie walks, and somehow I can't quite bring myself to add that to my list of reasons for Canada being the best country in the world.* Nonetheless, should anyone wish to seek out an exciting part-time career with the walking dead, further information can be found at http://www.zombiewalk.com/ and http://www.crawlofthedead.com/

-Sid

*Although, to our credit, people were pretty calm about it. I think that in a lot of countries someone would have been tempted to add realism by shooting the participants in the head with a shotgun.

A small request.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

I would like to thank my small readership for the compliments and observations about my blog that they have passed on in person or over the phone. But I'd be very grateful if you'd leave a comment on the blog, as well - I just think that it looks more, I don't know, lived-in, if people leave a note now and then.

-Sid

And also to you amen.

Architecture penguin catalogue misanthrope boilerplate unnecessary bus recent multiple random generation reply your neighborhood here meaningless modern decay ware idiosyncratic polymath and also to you amen typo giveaway subjunctive sesquipedalian dance.

-Anonymous, spam

Today at work I was chatting with Paul the in-house courier, an affable and entertaining young fellow, and we were discussing some random word spam that had made its way past the new Printing House spam filters. The spam in question had absolutely no sales pitch of any sort, it was just word salad, and we were speculating as to why anyone would send it. We agreed that it was probably just some sort of low-pass reconnaissance by the spammer community, just testing to see what would get through, but I presented the alternative theory that they were net dreams - the nascent consciousness of the Internet manifesting itself as the same sort of garbled metaphor that any of us might experience during a run of rapid eye movement.

Obviously, it's the first explanation, but imagine, imagine if it was the second one. The nature of consciousness is elusive at the best of times, and investigations of the phenomenon are hampered by that elusiveness. Recommended reading here would be Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he suggests that consciousness bears the same relationship to reality that roadmaps do to the landscape - a duplicate in another medium that allows us to find our way.* The Internet, with its odd connections, its millions of nodes, and its constant flow of information, would seem to be an acceptable start in the process of creating a digital analog of the human mind, a "duplicate in another medium".

But will that lead to consciousness? Science fiction author Vernor Vinge has suggested that there is a point in our future where the combination of humans and computers will cause the creation of some kind of superhuman intelligence, leading to a leap in our evolution that will defy description. He refers to this shift as the Singularity, and is understandably (or perhaps sadly) vague about how it will take place and what it will mean to us. In his defense, how could he be specific? What sort of leap of imagination could predict the nature of post-humanism? In his novel Marooned in Realtime, Vinge sets his scene by having a small portion of humanity that has been in stasis for a variety of reasons emerging in a post-Singularity world where the rest of humanity has vanished, leaving behind only vague clues as to the nature of the transcendent experience that has led to their disappearance.

I have to admit to being sceptical about the concept: jokes about internet dreams aside, I don't think that we are one step closer to the creation of technological sentience than we were a thousand years ago. Well, to be fair, we're one step closer - I suspect that in 1008 no one was thinking about it at all.

- Sid

* Yes, I DO own a copy of Mr. Jaynes' book, for the doubters among you. And, just to completely establish my geek credibility, I stumbled across it in a used book store and purchased it because I'd seen the Beast reading it in an issue of X-Men.