Another writer for my site requested the assignment of reviewing The Northman, though, and his review didn't convince me it had been a worthy follow-up to The Witch and The Lighthouse. So I waited until it became available at the normal rental rate, which has just occurred this week.
There's a chance I would have liked it more up on the big screen, but I doubt it.
While I was chatting with a friend on Facebook messenger during a break from The Northman, he told me if he'd seen it at home he would have walked out after 20 minutes. You can't "walk out" of your home, but the meaning was clear, and though I never intentionally leave a movie unfinished, I certainly get the sentiment.
The story follows Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard), who was Shakespeare's direct inspiration for Hamlet, which means the broad strokes of the story were already known to me before I started watching. Well, imagine a version of Hamlet with all the cleverness, humor and wordplay stripped out of it, leaving only the bloodthirsty revenge, and you've got a good idea what the experience of watching this movie is like. (I mean, you probably already have a good what the experience of watching this movie is like, since you saw it in the theater like a normal cinephile.)
I basically knew all that this movie would be from the very beginning, and never did I feel very impressed with it. Oh, a lot of hard work went into it, but for not much reward.
I think the point of the movie is supposed to be about the futility of revenge. Amleth flees the scene where his father was murdered, chanting "I will avenge you father, I will save you mother, I will kill you Fjolnir," that last being his uncle. But he finds out over the course of this movie that his father was probably awful, his mother cheered her husband's death, and she viewed his uncle as a savior.
We have to spend so much time watching Amleth engage in an increasingly baroque revenge scheme, though, that the movie can't help but sort of endorse it just by choosing to expose us to so much of it. Implicitly, a movie tells you what it thinks is important by the amount of time it devotes to that topic, and maybe if the idea that revenge is hollow is the point, it needs to be more explicit about that. Perhaps because he has already devoted so much of his life to his single-minded pursuit of vengeance, he's already got the sunk costs and doesn't feel like he can abandon the scheme now. That point is not really explored either.
When I talk about protracted revenge plots, though, I'm not only talking about the length of time it takes to dramatize them. I'm talking about being protracted within the life of the character.
It's of course an age-old narrative device -- and I mean like back to when there was only an oral storytelling tradition -- that the child of a slain father will devote his life to vengeance. And since the common wisdom is that revenge is a dish best served cold, there really is no statute of limitations on it. If you extrapolate this out to its logical endpoint, the best sort of revenge would be if you came and slit someone's throat on their deathbed -- though I suppose the idea is also to deprive them of some happiness they would have otherwise enjoyed.
For me, though, I feel like a person's life is going to feature any number of tragedies, and if you fixate on one of them you will live a much more empty existence. This perspective likely comes from the privilege of never having someone in my life who I needed to avenge. But if I did, and the opportunity to deliver revenge didn't come straight away, I'd like to think I'd "get over it" and channel my life into something more positive and fulfilling. Again, this is the enlightened perspective of a human being raised in the 20th and 21st centuries with access to modern psychological theories, who never had a righteous cause to seek vengeance, not that of a 10th century Viking.
But here I think we should bring in a character who would have a little bit more of that modern perspective: Bruce Wayne. And I was bothered by this part of the "protracted" quality of revenge in The Batman.
Now, The Batman is not strictly a vengeance story, or maybe not even primarily that. (Or if so, it's on the part of the villain, not the hero.) But the same inability to get over a tragedy long in the past informs it.
I have never quite believed that the killing of Bruce Wayne's parents would be such an everpresent part of his life, even what appears to be 20 years after it happened. That's always been a part of the Batman mythos, but The Batman makes it more explicit than other versions of this story have done. Because Robert Pattinson's Bruce is excessively mopey, even by the long-established standards of the character, we are even more confronted than usual with the notion that he's never gotten over the murder of his parents in an alley when he was a child.
Certainly it is a psychological reality that we can have scarring traumas that affect the trajectory of our whole lives. There can be no doubt about that. But I think film narratives have become increasingly reliant on what ends up being a romantic notion of this revenge plot, that there are people in our lives who are so good, whose absence is so foundation shaking, that their murder would provide the entire direction for a character's life.
I suppose at least in The Batman, we are meant to conclude at the end that Bruce has seen beyond his own protracted sorrow and is ready to step into the role of a more traditional hero, who does things more out of love than hatred -- love for the people who are still around, rather than hatred for the people who killed his parents. And in turn that's a way of loving them as well.
And yeah, you can certainly hit me with not understanding vengeance until I or someone I love has been wronged. I do understand vengeance, though. I'm still hoping some day to be in a position of advantage, for example, over the two guys who ran my college radio station in my senior year, who denied me a radio show in my last semester, in what I viewed as an act of spite. I don't want to kill them; I just want to be in a position to hire them for a job or something, and not only deny them, but tell them why I'm denying them. Zach and Nate, one day I will have my vengeance.
But I don't think about the radio station snub every day of my life and try to execute a plan to execute them.
I suppose that's the difference between not getting to play DJ and watching your father get beheaded by his own brother.
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