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LRB Michael Wood At the Movies
Michael Wood
Perhaps because its based on a lively trilogy of novels for supposed teenagers, m
ore probably because its writers and directors knew how to have a good time with
stereotypes, The Hunger Games movie series is attractive because it is so eclec
tic, because it raids whatever cultural bank or shopping mall is handy. The hero
ines name combines a plant with a character from Thomas Hardy: Katniss Everdeen.
If you frivolously mishear it as Catnip, as I did, you can be reassured: thats wh
at a friend calls her in the novel. The chief bad guy is called Coriolanus, and
the place where it all happens, to quote the first book, is a country that rose u
p out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America, now called Pane
m. The allusion is to Juvenals bread and circuses, but as pronounced in the movies
it sounds like the name of a defunct airline.
The novels by Suzanne Collins, who also had a hand in writing the movies, were p
ublished in 2008, 2009 and 2010, and by 2012 their sales had broken the record s
et by the Harry Potter books. The four movies strange how three keeps becoming f
our in the film world appeared in 2012, 2013, 2014, and last month. The Roman th
emes are everywhere and thats what the games are about, except that the people ju
st get the circus, no bread. The circus is an annual fight to the death among te
enagers chosen by lottery, two from each of the 12 districts that, along with th
e Capitol, make up the country. Actually there are 13 districts, but we dont know
that until the third movie, Mockingjay Part I: a district that has purportedly
been destroyed has literally gone underground and is now the centre of the resis
tance movement. The dictators idea is that if people have to lose their children
and watch them die on television all notions of rebellion will be perpetually di
spersed. Hes wrong, of course, but its a great theory for an evil dictator to have
, and it makes you wonder if a similar spirit isnt behind a lot of programme plan
ning in the real world: the unflagging coverage of Donald Trump, for example, wh
ich humiliates us as we watch it. Why do we watch it? Ask the dictator, he knows
.
The resistance offered by our heroine Katniss is unintentional at first, or at l
east unpolitical. Showing entirely the wrong spirit, she suggests a suicide pact
to Peeta, her partner from District 12, instead of killing him and becoming the
winner. This is where they both should have ended, but there were more books an
d movies in the offing, and Coriolanus decides to let them live on as a poster-c
ouple for the regime: they can distract the people with their great love story.
For a while. Coriolanuss cunning plan is to celebrate Panems 75th year by staging
a game starring only winners of previous games: there are some tough people in t
his set, who will easily take care of Katniss and Peeta. Hes wrong again, but not
in the way we perhaps expect. Our heroes are among the six survivors, but then
things go awry. The master of the games, Plutarch Heavensbee (even comic eclecti
cism can go too far), is secretly working for the rebels, and snatches Katniss a
nd two other survivors to take them to join the resistance in District 13. Unfor
tunately, Coriolanus has managed to capture the other survivors, and much of wha
t follows in the story depends on the way Katniss and Peeta feel about themselve
s and each other in their respective situations. She becomes a resistance heroin
e; he becomes a tortured government stooge.
There is a great moment near the end of Mockingjay Part I where Coriolanus allow
s Peeta to be rescued so that he can kill Katniss: hes been brainwashed into hati
ng her and programmed as a murder weapon. He nearly makes it too, and the attemp
t provides the best sequence in all four films. Katniss, her face bruised and he
r neck in a brace, gets up from her hospital bed and wanders into a place where
she hears the leader of the rebels making uplifting propaganda out of the triump
h of Peetas rescue. Then she turns away and finds herself peering into Peetas room

: he is strapped to his bed, and thrashing about in a crazed fury. The screen go
es black, end of movie.
Peetas brain gets unwashed, but very slowly, and hes an unreliable ally throughout
Mockingjay Part II at one point he kills a colleague by pushing him into a vast
sea of oily lava. I wont spoil or do I mean improve the suspense of the last mov
ie by telling the story, except to say that there is a grand, stylised, violent
climax and Coriolanus is dealt with, and that the efforts to provide a quietly u
p-beat domestic ending after that what could be more up-beat than the death of a
memorable bad guy? are truly excruciating.
There are some wonderful performances in these films, starting with that of Dona
ld Sutherland as the bad guy. White-haired, bearded, as jovial as he is sinister
, he makes dictatorship look like an intelligent sadists dream. In Mockingjay Par
t I, his aides think it is time for him to have Katniss killed, because she has
been visiting a hospital and stirring up revolt. He says no, then pauses. Kill th
e wounded. Not everyone could say that line with the discreet relish that Sutherl
and conveys.
Jennifer Lawrence is remarkable as Katniss. She looks vaguely morose even when s
he is happy, and she has the quality, rare in a movie star, of being able to loo
k glamorous at times and a pudgy mess at others without changing her character.
Julianne Moore is very good too, as Alma Coin, president of District 13. She is
smooth and eloquent, and no one suspects her of being anything other than the id
ealistic leader of the opposition. Perhaps the Mao suit might have given us a cl
ue, and we should have known that in this sort of fiction all leaders are bad gu
ys in the end, and most of ones pals, sooner or later, go over to the dark side.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Plutarch, died during the shooting of Mockingj
ay Part I, but left enough footage for all but a few scenes in the last movie. H
e is genial and scornful at the same time, a sort of (possibly) virtuous counter
part to Sutherland.
The eclecticism I mentioned earlier is especially evident in the movies unlikely
tones. Every season of the games is orchestrated as a show, with producers and d
esigners, as if killing and dying were just an excuse for expensive art and thea
tricals. Elizabeth Banks, as the producer Effie Trinket, wears one improbable wi
g after another, and would win any prize available for the most extravagant fals
e eyelashes. Stanley Tucci, as a television presenter, camps up every act of vio
lence and political betrayal as if it were just another morsel for the Minotaur
of showbusiness to eat. Collins has said she got her idea for certain aspects of
the series from watching footage of the Iraq War alternately with game shows. B
ut how the movies manage so successfully to do the campy stuff along with troubl
ed teenage romance and the desolation of bombed cities, is a question we would h
ave to put to the directors, Gary Ross (Hunger Games) and Francis Lawrence (the
other three films). It certainly works, because the comedy and romance and terro
r are vividly there. We cant reconcile them, and we would be in bad shape if we c
ould.
There is one effect that may link these pieces, even if the joke is on us. We ke
ep forgetting, as the characters do, that the world of The Hunger Games is one w
here nothing goes unfilmed. When Katniss visits a hospital in District 8, a plac
e that has been savagely bombed by Capitol forces, she takes a film crew with he
r, so that her distress can be part of resistance propaganda. This is mildly dis
tasteful, but we see the point. Then we glimpse Coriolanus far away in his mansi
on watching her visit live on screen, and distaste and/or sympathy turn to a for
m of fear for her and everyone else. This is not an invasion of privacy (Katnisss
trip wasnt private): its a cancellation of the very idea of place. There isnt anyw
here to go, you cant leave your observers behind. All this vision needs for it to
sneak into the next dimension is a mode of film that will show us things not wh
en they happen, but just before.

lrb.co.uk
LRB Michael Wood At the Movies
Michael Wood
What would you get if you combined The Great Dictator with Pulp Fiction and shif
ted the scene to France? One answer might be Quentin Tarantinos new film, Inglour
ious Basterds, but its not a great answer because the film itself is so many thin
gs. Of the identifiable movies within its fanciful confines, one is rather good,
another is so bad you have to like it and the third is just meandering. The ove
rall effect is not unpleasant, a special sort of dj vu. You find yourself trying n
ot so much to identify Tarantinos allusions as to remember the imaginary films he
makes you believe you have actually seen: Sergio Leones Once upon a Time in the
Resistance, for instance, or David Leans Bridge on the River Seine, or Jean-Pierr
e Melvilles Shadows of the Army.
The film opens with a homage to Leone, Morricone-style music (by Morricone, as i
t happens) on the soundtrack, and the words Once upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied Fra
nce. Not Occupied France, you notice, or even German-occupied France. In this mov
ie as in so many others, the party is the country, the only Germans are the Nazi
s. Not that this is any grounds for complaint, since Inglourious Basterds has tw
o of the finest movie Nazis you will see anywhere, all unctuous charm, fluency i
n several languages, and infinite sadism. Christoph Waltz, as the Jew-hunting Co
lonel Hans Landa, steals several shows but August Diehl, as an endlessly smiling
SS officer, is also pretty impressive. These people make you feel the Nazis hav
e all the fun, and certainly the best lines.
In the first of what Tarantino calls his chapters, we meet Colonel Landa taunting
an unfortunate French farmer who has hidden a Jewish family in his house. Landa
knows the family is there, the farmer knows he knows, and the only real question
is how long Landa can string out his ghastly impersonation of cordiality before
he gets the farmer to admit that he is hiding the fugitives. The farmer finally
confesses, weeping, and Landa calls his men in to execute the family only one m
ember manages to make her escape. The whole thing is lit and directed very sober
ly, but also so broadly that you find yourself wondering why you are so disturbe
d by this obvious scene, a sort of photographed cartoon. One reason is simple an
d historical: there is no rule that says cartoons cant kill. The other has to do
with Tarantinos skill as a movie-maker. Even when deep in clich he can make it loo
k as if the person in charge, the one who needs to ham things up and draw them o
ut, is the character rather than the director.
In the next chapter we meet the Basterds of the title, itself borrowed, Philip F
rench says, from a schlocky Italian exploitation movie released in 1978. I take it
the funny spelling represents both a nerdy joke and a precaution against copyri
ght trouble. They are a Jewish commando group under the orders of the Tennessee
hillbilly Lieutenant Aldo Raine, alias Brad Pitt. He has the worst imitation of
a rural Southern accent imaginable, but he talks less and less as the movie goes
on, and he does a lot of meaningful squinting to show how tough he is. He and h
is group hunt Nazis, with extraordinary and unexplained success. They kill and s
calp most of their victims Lieutenant Raine tells his men he is part Indian and
carve a swastika on the foreheads of the ones they spare, pour encourager les au
tres. If there is a moral point in the parallel between the savagery of the two
headhunters, Landa and Raine, it escapes me, although as the movie goes on its cl
ear there is a none too submerged allegory waiting for us. Those Germans are goi
ng to lose the war because theyre so clever. American stupidity will win out in t
he end because nothing will have diluted it. Whats impossible to know is how Tara
ntino himself views this story. Irony is not his thing, but stupidity isnt either
.

The chapter that follows is the most surprising. We meet Shosanna, the escapee f
rom the first scene, who is now the owner of a Paris cinema, taking down the let
ters describing last weeks films from the marquee. An amiable young German soldie
r shows up, who turns out to be a war hero he killed 350 Americans single-handed
ly and the star of a movie about his exploits. Here the plot distinctly thickens
. Goebbels is in town for the movies premiere, and so, we learn, will be all the
other Nazi bigwigs: Gring, Bormann and Hitler himself. The young soldier imagines
he is doing Shosanna a favour by getting Goebbels to hold the premiere in her c
inema, and the whole sequence begins to acquire the obvious but still worrying a
ir of menace we encountered at the beginning of the film. Shosanna is played by
Mlanie Laurent, who manages to look properly panicked and perfectly calm at the s
ame time. She has the films one truly brilliant idea: she will burn down the cine
ma with the Nazis in it, using all the nitrate stock she has to create and fuel
the blaze. She announces this scheme to her friend in the beautifully photograph
ed empty lobby of her cinema. Its as if she has to kill the movies to get rid of
the Nazis.
After this, Inglourious Basterds just gets lost. There is an English plot to blo
w up the same cinema. When the plot is half-foiled, Shosannas arsonist plan still
does the trick, and all the targeted Nazis get fried, along with everyone else
in the cinema. We are now in the realm not only of the fictional but of the deep
ly counter-factual.
Three features of the movie hang in the mind for me. Its most beautiful scene is
its most meaningless or, rather, it is full of meanings that make no sense in t
he context of the film. As Shosanna is about to substitute a piece of a film of
her own for a reel of the Nazi movie, a brief scene in which she explains they a
re all going to die, she is interrupted by the not-so-well-meaning German soldie
r. She shoots him, he shoots her, they lie spreadeagled and dead on the projecti
on room floor, caught in a fine high-angle shot, sentimental music on the soundt
rack. This is memorable and Wagnerian, a sort of love-death, but I dont know what
its doing here.
Next, the film is spoken in German and French for most of its duration, with lar
ge excursions into English and a brief comic scene in Italian. The language in e
ach case is very elaborate, almost baroque, and an essential part of the fun. Wh
at are we to do if we have only the subtitles to go by? How shall we grasp, let
alone enjoy the moment when a German actor playing an English soldier is caught
out by another German because of the imperfections of his German accent?
And finally, what do we make of the constant invitation to find simple, mindless
violence funny, while cunning cruelty is as scary as can be? When Hitler and hi
s pals are in Shosannas cinema watching the exploits of their hero, they laugh th
eir heads off every time an American is killed. In the Lincoln Odeon where I saw
Inglourious Basterds almost everyone laughed any time anyone got killed. Its tru
e the killings were mainly ludicrous in film terms, but the ludicrous isnt always
funny. I dont believe Tarantino wants to line his audiences up with Hitler but o
f course this is one of the risks of treating history as fantasy: the dreams and
the laughs are ours, the spectators are the only protagonists. We can accuse Ta
rantino of seeing reality as a movie, which he certainly does. But then we need
to make sure we dont just mean we prefer another, more sentimental movie.

lrb.co.uk
LRB Michael Wood At the Movies
Michael Wood

Unhappy the land that needs heroes, Galileo says in Brechts play of that name. Gali
leo wasnt thinking of superheroes, of course, but Jonathan and Christopher Nolan,
the writers of The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, are certainly thinking al
ong Galileos lines. What is Gotham City to do without a hero, since organised cri
me is always, it seems, far too much for the official institutions of law and or
der to handle? Yet what is it to do with a hero, when his sheer success with the
old criminals attracts new ones, drawn to the challenge like gunslingers in the
old West who have heard tell of the fastest gun alive?
Actually, the heros success in this movie attracts only one new criminal, but tha
ts enough, since he is a brilliant and genuinely frightening incarnation of the J
oker, the best psychopath in movies since Tarantinos Reservoir Dogs, a man for wh
om crime is a gratuitous act, neither reward nor compensation but merely the pla
ying out of a huge, perverse pleasure. At one point he climbs, slides down and t
hen burns a mountain of banknotes, to the consternation of his supposed partners
, the consolidated mobs of Gotham. Its alright, he informs them with a cackle, he
is burning only his half of the proceeds. The background to this event is an an
ecdote-cum-fable that Michael Caine, as the faithful servant Alfred, tells Chris
tian Bale as Bruce Wayne. There was a bandit in Burma, apparently, who stole jew
els at will from almost everyone and was never caught because he didnt want and d
idnt keep the jewels, he just stole them because he could. Alfred understands, as
Wayne doesnt, even in his other life as Batman, that there are minds bereft of w
hat anyone else would call a motive.
In retrospect the title of Christopher Nolans earlier Batman movie, Batman Begins
(2005), seems to declare a programme, even a contest. It implies that we shall
get the tale of the origins of Batman, as indeed we do: the childs ordeal in the
cave of bats, the murder of the childs parents. But we had the tale before, in Fr
ank Millers wonderful graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns (1986), and in the f
ilm Batman (1989), where an edgy Michael Keaton, engagingly, never managed to lo
ok as if his heart was in his superheroic second life. Batman begins, we suspect,
means: This is the real thing, the series starts here, forget about those old imp
ostors. Keaton gave up the role after Batman Returns (1992), but the series conti
nued with impostors Val Kilmer, in Batman Forever (1995) and George Clooney in B
atman and Robin (1997). Im more than happy to forget the last two of those films,
directed by Joel Schumacher, but the first two, both directed by Tim Burton, ha
ve much to recommend them not least the presence of Jack Nicholson as the Joker,
whose cheerful idea of havoc, very fine in its way, if essentially identical to
what Nicholson is up to in most of his other movies, offers a very good point o
f comparison with what happens to the role in the new film.
The best grounds for believing the new series really is a fresh start are a mixt
ure of style and content. Batman Begins is elegant and sombre, and portentous li
nes (To manipulate the fears of others you must first master your own fear) are de
livered with enough conviction to allow them to do their work, enough irony to a
llow us to enjoy their sheer hokum Liam Neeson, as the martial arts master who l
ooks like a corporate executive, is especially good at this. The new movie doesnt
have this kind of stylistic control, and becomes positively, earnestly talky at
the end, which itself arrives about half an hour too late. Batman is ready to t
ake on himself the crimes of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the district attorney
once described as Gothams White Knight and now just the corpse of a crazed avenge
r. He hasnt done anything wrong, has he? a boy asks, meaning Batman. The boys father
, Jim Gordon alias Gary Oldman, commissioner of police, Batmans sole friend among
the officials of Gotham, says: He is the hero Gotham deserves, but not the hero
it needs, and so he will be hunted. He is the dark knight . . . You cant enjoy thi
s as hokum, because the patent sincerity of the script and the character get so
entirely in the way. Also, the point of both movies is that Gotham needs rather
than deserves Batman.
The content of these films is curiously abstract, a fact half-masked by all the

gadgetry and mayhem: in the new work a motorbike constitutes itself out of the w
reck of the batmobile, and there are plenty of grand explosions, including a who
le hospital tumbling down in flames. There are also pointless fistfights wheneve
r the director feels the going may be slow. Lots of broken windows too. But the
abstraction carries an interesting anxiety. The bad guy in Batman Begins, and on
e of the bad guys in The Dark Knight, is a vigilante like Batman: in the first c
ase a good guy who goes too far (Liam Neeson wants to destroy Gotham City, in th
e spirit of the God who had had enough of Sodom and Gomorrah), in the second Har
vey Dent, a former good guy enraged by the loss of the woman both he and Batman
love. And the difference between these fellows and Batman is . . . that Batman w
ont kill. This distinction, morally crucial in the first film, becomes Batmans wea
kness in the second, or at best a personal faith maintained wishfully against th
e odds. When Batman, at the end, agrees to be taken for the killer he is not, we
are supposed to feel the distinction still matters greatly. It does, in all kin
ds of ways, because the distinction between law and lynching, to say nothing of
life and death, always matters. But you cant make lynching OK by stopping it shor
t of murder, and the scene in which Batman, enraged by his own helplessness and
incomprehension, batters away at the Joker in a police cell, tells us the whole
story. The amoral villain has won this moral round, and perhaps the whole fight.
The repeated claim for all Batman movies since Frank Millers graphic novel set th
e tone is to have discovered the darkness in the superheros life. This darkness,
it turns out, means hes an orphan and very angry, and in Nolans two films is a que
stion of imagery and sound rather than plot. Batmans mask is not only angry but v
icious, and Bales voice has been fixed to sound like Clint Eastwoods in Dirty Harr
ys most snarling moments. Whats dark is whatever lies between this figure and the
life of Bruce Wayne.
None of this is very interesting, and fortunately it is all rendered irrelevant
by the appearance of the Joker in The Dark Knight. Everything conspires to the p
erfection of this part: writing, make-up, acting. When the Joker says, having sh
ot a man during a bank raid, Whatever doesnt kill you, makes you . . . stranger, th
e old proverb adapted from Nietzsche (Whatever doesnt kill you makes you stronger)
acquires an entirely new life. And when he takes off a clown mask to reveal a ba
dly painted clown face beneath it, we know we are in for a scary treat. The eyes
are circled with smudged black, the cheeks violently rouged, the lips smeared b
right red, half-hiding long scars on either side of the mouth. The Joker likes t
elling stories about how he got these scars, especially when he has a knife to s
omeones face. His drunken father wanted the boy to laugh while his mother was bei
ng beaten. Why so serious? the father kept saying; and slit the boys mouth to creat
e a smile. No, that cant be it, because a little later he tells a different story
. He was trying to amuse his wife, who was sad because she had been scarred by a
n operation. So he stuffed some razor blades in his mouth, moving them around li
ke chewing gum, just to make her laugh. And you know what, after that she couldnt
bear the sight of him. Later still, the Joker starts on but doesnt finish yet an
other story of his scars, and we now know we are in a world of complete fiction.
At one point he says he is the agent of chaos, because he knows thats the sort o
f thing he ought to say at least once in a movie like this. Mainly, as he remark
s on another occasion, he just likes burning things. And even more than that, ma
king up tales that demonstrate both his indifference to truth and his uncanny se
nse of what will worry others.
Heath Ledger, who died of a drug overdose at the beginning of this year, was unt
il now best known as the stolid hero of a remake of The Four Feathers (2002) and
as the rather more complex figure at the centre of Brokeback Mountain (2005). N
othing we have seen of his career prepares us for what he can do as the Joker. B
y turns authoritative and wheedling, often speaking casually, with long pauses,
as if talking to himself, always acting, aware of circumstance and timing, and v
ery rarely manic (unlike the always manic Nicholson, for example), he creates a
character who is attractive and horrifying in exactly the right proportions: att

ractive because horrifying, perhaps. Even his rages seem parodies of rages. He p
rojects an enduring sense of calm beneath his craziness, so that you have to adm
ire his poise even as you wish he had never been invented. Whenever he appears,
or even whenever he seems to be in the offing or behind a piece of action, the m
ovie wakes up. A judge whose life has been threatened is instructed to drive her
self to a place of safety, its location indicated in an envelope she has been gi
ven. Unfortunately, although the plan is the official one, its been taken over by
the Jokers men. The judge sits in her car, opens the envelope. It contains a she
et of paper with one word on it: up. The car explodes.
This isnt funny, but it is witty. And the Joker makes even evil seem a puzzle too
easily solved because there is nothing he cant make a joke of, and because, unli
ke Batman, he is not the prisoner of a traumatic past but the inventor of one: h
e can have any past he likes. Any future too. Its striking that several people in
the movie call him a terrorist, an appropriate term only in a very loose sense.
He certainly terrorises people, in the movie and in the cinema. But terrorism,
strictly, is a political weapon, and the Joker doesnt have any politics, any more
than he has any morals. In this respect he resembles the slouching killer of th
e Coen brothers recent No Country for Old Men. He is not only someone we dont unde
rstand, he is the image of everything we dont understand, a travesty of highly in
telligent, meaningless design.