Arthouse Superheroes

All eyes will be on The Dark Knight when it hits the cinema screens this year – but perhaps for all the wrong reasons. After Heath Ledger tragically passed away in January, attention soon turned to what was one of his very last roles: the Joker. It was in director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the edgy sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, which was a highly successful attempt to reboot one of Hollywood’s biggest film franchises. Shortly before his death, Ledger revealed he had struggled with the role of the sociopathic mass-murderering clown. While he called it “the most fun I’ve ever had, or probably ever will have playing a character,” it also utterly exhausted him.

By Angus Paterson

Christopher Nolan says of Ledger: “Having seen the movie myself in such heightened and tragic circumstances… What I found in watching the movie is that you’re not looking at the actor, you’re not looking at the friend, you’re not looking at the colleague. You’re looking at the Joker.
He inhabits this character, and it’s an extraordinary icon, so it’s easy to enjoy it on that level, just as a great piece of acting.”

When Nolan’s unique vision for both Batman and his arch enemy the Joker returns this July, it’ll be another example of Hollywood looking to the best directors of arthouse and independent cinema in order to give the lucrative superhero genre a much-needed creative kick up the ass.
Lets have a look at some of the most interesting examples.

Ang Lee’s The Hulk

Taiwanese-born Ang Lee is a chameleon of a director. Responsible for Hong Kong dramas early in his career like The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Women, he later struck out to direct projects as diverse as American suburban angst flick The Ice Storm, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the Academy Award winning Brokeback Mountain as well as his breakthrough smash, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And then there was The Hulk, which marked Lee as one of the most interesting (and controversial) choices to ever direct a superhero film.

True to its comic book origins, the Hulk himself was painted as a metaphor for what happens when emotional repression bubbles to the surface and just cannot be contained anymore – you get real angry, real green and a lot of stuff gets smashed up. After all, when it comes to
emotional repression Lee is an old pro – it’s a constant theme that runs through all of his work, including all the before-mentioned films. The problem here was that audiences were expecting
a B-Grade cheese-fest more along the lines of the tacky 70s television show, instead of a subtle, slow-burn drama interspersed with moments of explosive action, which is what Lee delivered. Though it was a commercial hit, critically it was (unfairly) considered a failure by many.

Deep and dramatic as it may have been, Lee still managed to demonstrate he’s just as deft with handling exhilarating action as he is with human drama. The film’s major action set piece – where the Hulk escapes from a desert military base and makes his way to San Francisco, pursued all the while by the US military in full flight – is one of the best of its kind ever seen in a superhero film.

Read the full story in Corker Issue 2: Winter 2008

Illustration by Dennis Juan Ma