All art has an element of the autobiographical. It is not special in this regard. Art has this in common with all fields of human endeavor, in which past experiences influence present actions. A teacher revises his lesson plan based on the previous class’s response, an Uber driver takes a different route because she ran into construction the day before — or a nuclear physicist designs the most dangerous weapon in the history of humankind because his brain is uniquely wired to understand the process, and because his Jewishness and left-wing politics drive home the terror that if he doesn’t do it, the Nazis will. In all cases choice is involved, and the work you make, including creative work, is not simple regurgitation; talent, skill, and imagination all come into play, and can be honed and sharpened to make better work over time. 

So I think it trivializes neither the hard work that artist Christopher Nolan poured into Oppenheimer — nor the grievous actions depicted in the film itself — to suggest that Oppenheimer, too, is reflective of the life of its creator. (He did cast his own daughter as the woman whose face peels off in the title character’s horrific vision of what he has wrought in an admittedly unconscious expression of his horror of the bomb, so I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb.) Here, after all, we have the story of a brilliant technician, preeminent in his field, successful in ways few of his colleagues can hope to emulate. He is tasked with the completion of a tremendous project that will change the world forever, which he completes with nearly (but not quite—ask Jean Tatlock) monomaniacal furor even when the need that initially drove him to do so subsides. Unleashed upon the world his project is an even bigger success — from the perspective of his bosses, if not that of humanity in general or the people of Japan in particular — than he imagined. And for one reason or another, he will regret that success for the rest of his life.

I wrote about Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan, and the explosion (and implosion?) of the superhero boom for Decider.

Better to be a king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime!
—Rupert Pupkin, The King of Comedy

Laugh and the world laughs with you!
—The Joker, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Robert de Niro will soon co-star in a film about a deranged man who fancies himself a comedian and is driven to crime by a late-night talk show host.

This time around, however, de Niro isn’t playing the insane up-and-comer, as he did in Martin Scorsese’s 1982 black comedy classic, The King of Comedy. Rather, rumor has it, Bobby D will be the superstar who spurs Joaquin Phoenix’s descent into madness in director Todd Phillips’ stand-alone movie about the Joker, nemesis of Batman and anyone taking Jared Leto seriously alike.

That distinctive chemical odor you’re smelling isn’t Smilex gas, but an air of superfluousness surrounding the whole project. The movie exists in parallel to the DC film universe, where Leto remains attached to both a Suicide Squad sequel (where his take on the character debuted) and in his own stand-alone Joker movie. Nor is it simply that the work of Martin Scorsese is cited as an inspiration anytime Phillips’ movie pops up in the trades. To an extent, that stands to reason: Scorsese is the film’s executive producer, and his signature star is in the cast. “Grim and gritty,” Taxi Driver, ’70s/’80s noir — word on the street, including what Polygon has heard from crew members, is that the Joker movie is an extended Marty homage.

Here’s the thing: The King of Comedy already is a near-perfect Joker movie. (It’s a near-perfect movie in general, but it’s a Joker-specific one, too.) It’s a glimpse into the mind of a man who’s convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he’s one of the funniest people in the world, and who’s determined that the world must be made in on the joke. Beneath the purple suit, green hair and greasepaint-white skin, that’s what makes the Joker tick.

I’d like to thank Joaquin Phoenix’s upcoming Joker movie for giving me the excuse to write at length about Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy for Polygon. Guest stars include Robert De Niro, Sandra Bernhard, Jerry Lewis, the Clash, Grant Morrison & Dave McKean, Alan Moore & Brian Bolland, Frank Miller, and a lengthy encomium to Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman movie. Rupert Pupkin, ladies and gentlemen!

The Dream Machine: ‘Superman: The Movie’ (1978)

Where to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

The machinery of the modern-day blockbuster — kick-started by Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” and thrown into high gear by George Lucas’s “Star Wars” — never operated in a more chaotic, or mercenary, fashion than it did in this big-budget work of art-by-committee. There was its small army of screenwriters, credited and uncredited (including the author of “Godfather,” Mario Puzo); the decision to shoot the film and its sequel simultaneously in order to increase the return on investment; the fortune thrown at Marlon Brando for just a few minutes of screen time as Superman’s Kryptonian father; the conflicts between director Richard Donner and his producers that led to his ouster before the sequel was completed (Richard Lester stepped in): All in all, the process was as industrial as building a car.

But all that fades away the moment the movie begins. The visual effects, most notably the Zoptic front-projection system that made Superman’s flight convincing, won an Oscar. The star-studded supporting cast, with Margot Kidder as a vivacious Lois Lane, Brando as Jor-El and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, gave the thing gravitas. Finally, there’s Superman himself: Christopher Reeve, in a performance so effortlessly charming yet rooted in thoughtful physicality, it forever associated him with the role. His instantaneous change in posture and expression when he switches between Superman and Clark Kent remains a wonder to behold.

The Reaganomicon: ‘RoboCop’ (1987)

Where to watch: Stream it on DirecTV Now or IFC; rent it from iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

Despite the success of “Superman” and its even better sequel, “Superman II,” the standard superhero seemed a little superfluous in the 1980s. With President Ronald Reagan telling tales of good versus evil straight out of a comic book, and action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis sculpting their physiques to cartoon-worthy levels, who needed spandex?

Enter “RoboCop,” the sci-fi satirist Paul Verhoeven’s biting black comedy in ultraviolent action-hero drag. In a dystopian future where hospitals are driven by profit and police departments use military-grade weaponry — imagine all that! — a badly-wounded rookie cop (played by the unlikely action star Peter Weller) is fitted by a creepy corporation with cybernetic enhancements that increase his lethality but wipe out his memory. The story of a super-cop literally fighting against his own programming in order to reclaim his humanity — in a city being stripped for parts by the superrich — is as poignant now as it was in Reagan’s America.

Blockbuster Begins: ‘Batman’ (1989)

Where to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

Almost as soon as the TV show “Batman” went off the air, darker material began to ferment in the comic-book depictions of the Caped Crusader and his peers. “Batman” was the blockbuster that brought this grimmer vision roaring into multiplexes and the mainstream consciousness. Directed with confident neo-noir style by Tim Burton, the movie pivoted off works like the cartoonist Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and employed an array of talent — the composer Danny Elfman; the production designer Anton Furst; and Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson as Batman and his psychopathic nemesis, the Joker — working at or near their career peaks.

While “Batman” remains one of the genre’s best films (the best, if you want my opinion), its industry innovations sometimes overshadow its aesthetic excellence. The movie’s PG-13 rating became standard for tent-pole movies, while its record-breaking box office enshrined opening-weekend revenue as a key measurement of a film’s success. “Batman” was an inescapable last gasp of Big ’80s monoculture; that summer, the bat symbol was nearly as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola.

I’m really glad my editors at the New York Times talked me into writing a cultural history of superheroes on film and television, touching on changing mores, aesthetics, technology, showbiz, and American society in general. I’m very proud of how this piece turned out, especially of the effort we made to give proper credit to the characters’ original creators. And there’s links to where you can watch every single movie and show on the list online!

Batman isn’t the star of The Dark Knight. That’s plain old conventional wisdom at this point. But Christian Bale’s foil, Heath Ledger’s iconic Joker, isn’t the star either. Not really. Nor is it Harvey Dent, Gotham’s white knight, or Jim Gordon, the archetypal honest cop, or Rachel Dawes, the doomed idealist, or Lucius Fox, the steady hand, or Alfred, the faithful servant.

The real star of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s cinematic superhero landmark, is the concept of ethical behavior — and the performance stinks.

Written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who’s currently taking an equally high-minded and heavy-handed approach to ethical issues in Westworld, The Dark Knight is fixated on the opposition between right and wrong, order and chaos, and hope and despair, all to a degree no other superhero movie as come close to touching. While most costumed-and-caped adventures are content to let such issues stay subtextual, with the superpowered slugfests between heroes and villains serving as a metaphor for these underlying conflicts, The Dark Knight spins them into the whole plot.

Who’s a better example for Gotham City to follow out of its long-standing hell of crime and corruption: Dent, an elected official who obeys the will of the people and observes the rule of law, or Batman, a self-appointed vigilante who follows no rules but his own? Who’s right about the nature of humanity, Batman, who wants to serve as a symbol to inspire the stifled good he believes exists within everyone, or the Joker, who wants to prove that all systems — from organized crime to democracy — are just pancake makeup applied to a scarred mass of nihilism and brutality? To stave off chaos, is it permissible to inflict order on the whims of one man?

The answers the film wants us to take away are obvious. Dent, not Batman, is the hero Gotham needs; Batman, not the Joker, sees the hearts of his fellow citizens clearly; even in the face of overwhelming danger, the power to stop it must be checked before it becomes just as dangerous.

These aren’t the answers that the film actually provides. By emerging just before the dawn of Barack Obama’s presidency, when the general consensus in America seemed sick and tired of the unending and overreaching War on Terror as it was of the terrorists said war was ostensibly designed to fight, The Dark Knight tapped into a national mood — the film repeatedly describes the Joker’s actions as “terrorism” — and sent the audience home with a positive message. But the film itself is a hopeless political muddle, constantly trying to have its liberty vs. security, order vs. anarchy, vigilantism vs. legitimacy cake and eat it, too.

I made my debut at Polygon as part of their enormous suite of stories on the 10th anniversary of The Dark Knight, with a look at the film’s much-ballyhooed, totally incoherent political and ethical stances.

At least Harvey Bullock gets to dress up nice for his ignominious adventure tonight. The grizzled vet un-grizzles himself for a visit to the Foxglove, a supposedly swanky sex club that plays Suicide songs about Marvel Comics characters on its sound system — thank God it wasn’t “Frankie Teardrop,” or things would have gotten really weird — for the entertainment of a clientele decked out in fetish gear to a hilariously explicit degree. (When Harvey finally placed everyone under arrest, here’s hoping he started with whatever Foley artist decided to add the squealing pig to the mix.) Looking around this Eyes Wide Shut meets the Gimp hellscape, it’s hard not to wonder who the target audience is — perverts who thought Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy was too intellectual, maybe? Perhaps some mysteries are best left unsolved.

Forgot to link this at the time, but I reviewed the penultimate Gotham episode for Rolling Stone.

It feels weird to complain that a TV show is too violent the day after the new Game of Thrones season premiere was eagerly consumed by thousands (some of them legally, even). But since neither Batman nor Tyrion Lannister got where they were by playing by the rules, neither will we. “Beasts of Prey,” the aptly named episode that marks Gotham’s return to the airwaves after a number of weeks off, is a boringly brutal affair. It’s stuffed with bloodletting that wastes time on characters we’ve got no attachment to and, in the process, tarnishes those we do.

I reviewed this week’s gross episode of Gotham for Rolling Stone.

The Scarecrow. The Joker, maybe. Fish Mooney carving her own eye out with a spoon. Gotham has really been cooking lately, and the madness and mayhem of its villians are what’s kept the fire burning. In that light, the prospect of an episode about bad apples in the GCPD is about as welcome as a VIP pass to a nightclub performance by the Penguin’s mom. But on the mean streets of Gotham City, miracles, like full-body transplants, can happen. And tonight’s cop-centric installment “Everyone Has a Cobblepot” was the latest in a long line of beautifully berserk hours of pseudo-superhero TV.

I reviewed this week’s Gotham for Rolling Stone.

If you say a show is “firing on all cylinders,” you conjure an image of a vehicle moving at maximum speed, all its component parts working together for optimum effect. Gotham, on the other hand, may be more like the Wonkamobile. But its tonally disconnected bangs and clangs and explosions are, at this point, no less formidable than the proverbial well-oiled machine. The past few weeks have shown that if the show jerry-rigs enough weird, wild, occasionally emotional parts together, the whole can be a real whiz-bang contraption. And tonight’s episode — “Red Hood” — had plenty of pop to go around.

For starters, Jada Pinkett Smith carved her own eyeball out with a spoon.

I reviewed last week’s Gotham for Rolling Stone.

[Showrunner Bruno] Heller has been cagey about Jerome, the gibbering ginger played by Shameless star Cameron Monaghan, refusing to outright label him the Caped Crusader’s future archnemesis. On the one hand, that’s good mythos management: The Joker has no official origin, a fact Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the character got a lot of murderous mileage out of in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. (“You wanna know how I got these scars?”) He could be anyone and no one — a big part of his terrifying allure.

On the other hand, Gotham’s reluctance to call Jerome the J-word could just be another example of genre television’s post-Lost fixation on mystery over meaning. Raise a bunch of questions, promise “the answers,” throw the audience a bunch of red herrings (or in this case a redhead), rinse, repeat. And if the series is teasing their Joker-to-be only to eventually reveal otherwise, it’d hardly be the first time a superhero show faked out its audience.

So what’s the best strategy for enjoying the character, in all his villainous potential? Ignore Jack Nicholson’s advice and don’t think about the future. Just appreciate Jerome for what he is: a little jolt of Joker-esque mirth and mayhem. He’s surrounded by the Cirque du Insanity trappings that have come with the character ever since creators Jerry Robinson, Bill Finger, and Bob Kane thought him up. Does Monaghan lay it on a little thick? You bet. So what? This is (maybe) the most famously gleeful, gloriously over-the-top supervillain we’re talking about here. Restraint is not his strong suit. If you can’t camp it up as the Clown Prince of Crime, what has this society come to?

Ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight? I reviewed this week’s Gotham for Rolling Stone.

Hit the Bat-signal and spread the word: Gotham is crawling out its slump. For the second week in a row, strong writing for the series heavies, from its dueling Dons to the once and future Scarecrow, injected much-needed mirth and menace into the often shaky show. Serious flaws are still abound, but you may be having too much fun to notice.

For starters, a Scarecrow was born, as teenage Jonathan Crane receives a hot shot of toxin so strong it warps his mind forever. (If he only had a brain!) But while his J-horror-meets-4H hallucinations of straw men with gaping maws and fiery eyes were reasonably creepy, it was his father,Dr. Gerald Crane (a realistically rumpled Julian Sands), who was the episode’s true nightmare. His pseudoscientific scheme to rid himself of fear by essentially overdosing on it made intuitive, if not biological, sense; when it comes to supervillainy, that’s more than enough. The point was driven home most effectively not by Crane’s hallucinations of his incinerated wife, but by something more prosaic. “Think I’m afraid of you? Afraid of your guns?” he asks when the cops corner him — then immediately comes out blasting, right out there in the open, bullets be damned. That jolt of surprise delivered the message in a way that medical monologues or syringe close-ups couldn’t.

I liked another episode of Gotham! I reviewed tonight’s ep for Rolling Stone.

Whoa, whoa, whoa: Was that really the same Bat-time, same Bat-channel we just watched?

Tonight’s episode of Gotham, “The Fearsome Dr. Crane,” was clever, creepy, funny on purpose, deliberately disturbing (instead of thoughtlessly so), and graced with an excellent villain-of-the-week. In other words, it was everything the show has not been for a long, long while. The temptation here might be to use it as a Batarang and lob it at every other half-hearted installment this lackadaisical longform origin story has given us, but I don’t think that’s what Thomas and Martha Wayne would want, may they rest in peace. This was a good hour of TV, for God’s sake. Let’s just enjoy it while it lasts.

I liked tonight’s episode of Gotham. I repeat: I liked tonight’s episode of Gotham. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone. If I might suggest it, please pay attention to the last graf, where I talk about the episode’s approach to horror, which was enormously effective.

Let us now sing the praises of no man’s lands. “Welcome Back, Jim Gordon,” tonight’s episode of Gotham, features two brief scenes shot in semi-subterranean nether-regions, places that exist solely as way-stations between the places you actually want to go. In the first, anonymous goons in the employ of Don Falcone wheel a gurney with an unseen, unknown passenger through an equally unfamiliar — and underlit — abandoned warehouse-cum-torture laboratory of a mob Mengele named Bob.

In the second, recently reinstated Detective Jim Gordon chases a corrupt cop called Delaware down into the GCPD’s parking garage, cuffing him on the hood of his car and rifling through his trunk for contraband. Cold blue daylight shines down through grates in the ceiling while vertically mounted florescents on every column radiate a sickly green. The settings may not be unique, especially in dark genre fare, but they’re beautifully visualized nonetheless — sprawling yet claustrophobic, creepy and lovely to look at.

If emphasizing the lighting and set dressing in a couple of throwaway sequences gives the impression that there’s not much else worth praising here…well, yeah, pretty much. Corruption within the Gotham City Police Department has driven the story of some of the best Batman comics of all time, from Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s Batman: Year One to Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Michael Lark’s Gotham Central, two obvious influences on the show. Yet the topic’s handling here is as subtle as the character’s countless fists to each other’s face.

I reviewed tonight’s Gotham for Rolling Stone. It was Gotham, alright.

Over in the mob-war storyline, Fish Mooney finally makes her move against Don Falcone by staging a kidnapping of Liza, her mole in the boss’s inner circle. “I didn’t think it was going to be you,” Falcone tells Fish when she makes contact. After playing dumb for 15 seconds, she admits the plot is hers. His reply? “Of course it is. How long have I known you? You’re the smart one in the family, didn’t I always say so?” So he didn’t think Fish would betray him, but he’s known her so long and admired her intelligence so much that “of course” he knew she betrayed him? These lines come less than a minute apart in the same conversation!

I reviewed this week’s atrociously written episode of Gotham for Rolling Stone. Do stick around for the comments; angry Gotham fans are easily the most adorable angry TV fans.

Movies, video games, toys, movies based on video games based on toys: The Bat-Signal has cast the Dark Knight’s shadow on such an enormous portion of the pop-culture landscape that it’s now possible for a generation of Bat-fans to never once crack the cover of a single comic book. And now that Gotham exists, they really don’t need to. Episodes like tonight’s return from winter break — “Rogues’ Gallery” — recreate the experience of reading a mediocre Bat-book so perfectly that they all but feel plucked from a back-issue bin at a Comic-Con dealer’s table. The isolated moments of zany inspiration and compelling atmospherics, surrounded by scene after scene of ham-fisted character work, inert dialogue, and rehashed crime/cop/horror clichés — it’s not a great deal, but at least Gotham is free with your broadcast package, and Senator Clay Davis makes a cameo.

Guess who’s officially covering Gotham for Rolling Stone now?

I reviewed Illegal Batman by Ed Pinsent for Vorpalizer. This is really some comic.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve made my debut at Wired, writing about recent developments in Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham’s Batman Incorporated #8. I tried to place the event in the context of Morrison’s run, and Morrison’s run in the context of the other things going on both with him and with Batman and DC Comics in recent years. Thanks to Laura Hudson for the opportunity.

And at Vorpalizer, I’ve written about Ron Howard’s Willow and the art and comics of Uno Moralez. Running the gamut!

I wrote up a list of 15 essential Batman graphic novels—essential, not necessarily best; you’ll see—for Rolling Stone. Number one is definitely number one, though.

Here I am on CBS New York’s local news channel WLNY’s morning show Live from the Couch, talking about The Dark Knight Rises with Cinema Blend’s Katey Rich and hosts Carolina Bermudez and John Elliott last Friday. It was a tough morning, so I’m grateful to the hosts for their thoughtful, sensitive, and nonsensationalistic questions, and to both them and Katey, an old hand at this, for putting me at ease. Hope you dig it.

That’s the headline I saw right before I left my house to appear on live television to talk about The Dark Knight Rises this morning. As the segment concluded I said that Batman represents the fantasy that one man can have a meaningful effect on random violence of this sort, and that the presence of the character in our culture can be reassuring. I was amazed to hear this come out of my mouth, since I do not at all believe the line that superheroes are our way of telling ourselves how much better we can be. And yet I know what I said to be true. When I was in college, a friend of mine was murdered. I’m exaggerating even as I type: She and I were friendly, but what she really was was the estranged ex-best friend of my then-current best friend, so to the extent that I thought or talked much about her before the night she was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant who is still at large today, those thoughts and words were negative. This didn’t help make her murder any easier to take. I don’t know if it made it harder. I know it made it weirder. How do you process the meaninglessness of murder in the face of the petty personal gripes and grievances it renders even more meaningless? For reasons I couldn’t articulate then, one of the ways to process it was to read The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and escape into the fantasy world of a man with a gaping wound for a psyche, who closes that wound by beating the world around it into the shape of the hole. After I read it I gave my treasured, dog-eared, beat-up copy — the one I was given as a gift in sixth grade by the one kid in my class who was already listening to PiL and getting blowjobs from eighth graders, the one he’d stolen from his older brother and been impressed with as he read it while taking a dump — to my friend, with an inscription I can’t remember other than that it positioned the book as a psychic pain reliever for what she was feeling. I still believe that to be true, as I believed it then; in neither case do or did I believe it because I think Batman is an inspiring example of hope to be emulated. The Batman fantasy is comforting because it is a fantasy. Reading about him or watching movies about him is a pleasant way of being reminded that the idea of a single man putting the world to rights is the stuff of movies and comic books, the stuff of make-believe. The real world has no Batman and never will. It will always be this way. Only when you let go of the hope that it can be something else can you come to terms with what it is rather than dashing your mind against the rocks of what it can never be.