The Dark Knight Rises...Over Riverdale!

The Dark Knight Rises, the third instalment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy opened to much fanfare and critical acclaim across the world last month. Now I’ve never understood how perfectly reasonable, fully grown men can be so fascinated with other men in masks and body suits, but hey, we all have our flaws. Personally, I have a thing for women in masks and body suits. So I think to myself, right, I should probably check this out. Which I promptly do.

Am I alone in thinking Mr. Nolan & Co completely ripped off an Archie comic in writing this movie? The story is set eight years after The Dark Knight, and the once crime-ridden city of Gotham is now in a state of Riverdale-like peace and tranquillity. We have Batman, channelling Archie Andrews, getting himself into all sorts of trouble by falling for the wrong girl, Miranda Tate. Miranda of course is a billionaire psychopath, much like Veronica, and has decided to put her considerable good looks and money to good use by annihilating Gotham. Then there’s Selina Kyle, the sporty girl-next-door who we just know would be so right for Batman, much like Betty for Archie.

I could go on and on. Bane, for all his League of Shadows infamy, is really just Big Moose with a marginally better vocabulary. Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman with no small amount of self-mockery, is oddly reminiscent of Professor Flutesnoot and his lab experiments. But the clincher, for me, was Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler and confidante. I had to punch myself in the throat to keep from laughing out loud when kindly old Alfred tells Bruce he kept looking across his usual table at a restaurant in Florence where he was holidaying, hoping to see him there, wifey in tow. I mean, holy smokes, Alfred! This is Batman we’re talking about- crusader of justice, terrified of winged mammals. It’s the kind of thing only moms are allowed to say. You just know Archie’s mom would say the same thing if he were pushing forty, living at home and sporting a faux-bohemian goatee. Yes Alfred, you old romantic, we’ll always have Florence. 

Every me, every you

I hoard information. It's what I do. When I like someone, I can never stop with the basics - where they work, what they like to do with their spare time, why they prefer Wednesday afternoons to Thursday mornings. Not enough. I need to know what they looked like as kids. Why they're afraid of commitment. Who broke their hearts and when and how. If they had a dungarees phase, whether they rate Seinfeld higher than Arrested Development,  where they see themselves six months down the line. I need to be let in, and allowed to poke around, hammering away at their walls, their defenses, till they're laid bare for me to redecorate, to be clothed in me.

This is usually a long and drawn out process, spread over first dates and celebratory dinners and birthday parties and weekends together and impromptu trips to Giants Causeway. It just sort of happens- little nuggets of information about their personality, their views on politics and philosophy and sports that they unknowingly  drop into my eager, waiting hands, nary a clue that they're being stored for posterity in a possibly Frankensteinian data lab in the back of my twisted mind, mixing and analyzing and holding up to the light to see what parts I'd like to keep, what I'd choose to delete.

Maybe it's not as sinister as it sounds. I suppose we all do it, one way or the other, exorcise the ghosts of the past, personalize our persons of interest. Deprogram all the conditioning out of them, what they've come to expect out of a relationship based on what they've had before, little Pavlovian treats for a trick unlearned, a tick unticked, an ex outgrown. What good is being with someone if you can't change them, turn them into you? Isn't that what this is all about, this crazy dance we do, aren't we all really just looking for a better, more beautiful us we can crawl into?    

I'm not sure any more. Maybe you can just like someone exactly as they are. Maybe all the hoarding, the sifting through life data, the perusal of their minds for words you can swallow or borrow or deconstruct, maybe that's all we need. Maybe you'll meet someone so secure in their skin, you'll want them to change you instead, to lend you a little bit of them. Could that happen? Maybe that instinct, that need, to completely take over and inhabit somebody else's existence becomes less pronounced with time, with age and maturity and learning to be okay with one's self. I certainly hope so. It'd be a shame to fuck this one up.    

   Icy Highs's Music Recco: "Every Me, Every You" by Placebo from Without You, I'm Nothing

Shaken and stirred

I look around and try to read their faces. They're giving nothing away. I'm ready to burst. I'd like to call a friend, or buy somebody a drink, just to talk. How do these people practise silence with such calm? They're not even reading a magazine, or pretending to follow the soap on the television mounted to the wall. They're just staring straight ahead, their gazes so fixed I wonder if they can see through the wall and into the room of the doctor we're all waiting to consult.

This is my third doctor this month. This one's a good egg, the best. He's known as a sharp shooter; no sugar-coating or expensive prescriptions. He's the extra round all the really professional assassins fire into a corpse, to make sure it's really dead. If you don't believe the other quacks, if you think this just cannot be happening to somebody your age, someone as careful as you are, someone so nice, you go to him. He'll tell you it's true, and you'll believe it. His job is to strip you off all sense of entitlement, and he does so with grace.

He holds in his hands detailed reports on the composition, deficiencies and excesses of my urine, blood, fecal matter. I'm cold in the gown the orderly helped me into, but I'm also sporting an erection. It's more intimate than you'd think, having someone study your soul so clinically. He goes over every little detail, his forehead furrowed in concentration. He looks like a washed up Daniel Craig, with a sort of nerdy muscularity that I know women find attractive. I'd like him to punch me repeatedly in the face, just to see if I can take it.

"I'm sorry," he says, "this is rare in somebody your age."
It's real. It's really real.
"Is there anything you can do?" I still have faith in Craig.
"'Fraid not," he says lightly, breezily, "this is the end. You've simply run out of words."

           Icy Highs's Music Recco: "The Frontman" by Madrugada (The Nightly Disease)

Punk Rock Princess

I was ten. She was my sister's best friend, and my first love. She was a newly America-returned, furious-to-be-back-in-India law student, and my sister's classmate. She would come over on weekends, as much for respite from the matronly clutches of Catholic hostel life as for home-cooked meals and companionship. She was the queen of detached-cool, as apathetic to the disciplinarian regime of our household as she was to brassieres and conversational propriety.

She would complain loudly of menstrual cramps at dinner. She would swear at the maid if her clothes were left in the sun to dry, and openly poke fun at our accents. She was mean and terrifying and the antithesis of everything I was brought up to believe girls were like. She introduced me to Nirvana and Soundgarden, and my sister to lip gloss and mascara. She had black stars on her nails, and heartbreak in every footstep. For two days every week that year, I was a sickly lone leaf trembling in the wake of her hurricane.

She knew, of course. She was nice about it. She would do that indulgent flirty thing eighteen year old girls do- tussle my hair, and wink conspiratorially when I came out of the bathroom, and ask me if I had a girlfriend. I wasn't the only one either. My sister started walking like her, and prefixing sentences with "like". My Dad dug up an old pair of bell bottomed Levis he probably last wore in the Seventies, and started wearing them around the house. I had been asking him for years if I could cut them into shorts, and now they looked destined to explode around my Dad one day owing to sheer gut pressure. My mother -sensible, self-contained mother- said she had a refreshing individuality when she set our Parakeet free. We were a family of fools, all hopelessly enamored with a punk rock princess from hell.     

I was the first person she told when she found out she was leaving. For that, I will always be grateful. It was Valentine's Day. I made her a card, with an anatomically accurate drawing of a human heart on the front that I traced from my sister's old textbook. I was certain she would appreciate the humor, that it would unite us forever in loving embrace. I was always one for forevers. I had even prepared a speech for the occasion.

I told her I wanted to tell her something, that she shouldn't go to bed immediately after dinner. She said -to my utter horror- that she needed to tell me something too, to meet her by the water tank after everybody went to bed. The water tank was our place. It was where we went when my sister was at dance classes, or moot court practice. It was on the terrace, on the third floor, and we would sit on it swinging our legs, or lie on our backs, listening to music on her Walkman, one earphone in each of our ears, our faces sometimes so close it was all I could do to stop breathing.

I had never been up there at night before. Judging by the ease with which she navigated the stairs, leading the way, deftly skipping the broken rung, reaching for the banister just before the climb got tricky, it wasn't her first time. She offered her hand, and I refused, determined to be as much of a man as my little lovesick heart would allow me to be.

The sky was everything the movies tell you these moments should be. We clambered on to the water tank and sat in silence, just looking at the stars, the odd foot brushing against the other's in mid-swing. She asked me if I wanted to listen to some music. I declined. We sat a little longer, no words exchanged. I had never felt that calm around her before. She was just a girl. I was going to do this.

And then she did something. A little movement of the hand, a pursing of the lips, that would change my life for ever. She lit up a cigarette. I had never seen a woman smoke before, not even on TV. It was the most beautiful, most sensuous, most ridiculously cool moment of my life. It was the endearing image of my first love, the prototype for the kind of woman I would fall again and again in love with in my adolescence, in my adulthood, possibly the rest of my life.

She offered me a drag. I coughed and she put her hand to my mouth, laughing. The world swum around me, just a little at first, then with great violent thrusts of its limbs that made me seasick. I decided to lie down. She reached for my face, concerned, and did something to my hair that made her seem far away and deep inside me all at once. I struggled back up. "I love you," I said. 

She said she was sorry. She thanked me for the card, she loved it. She said she was leaving, back to Seattle where her friends and family were. She said I needed to lighten up, that rules weren't all meant to be followed. "Don't tell anybody," she said, "but you're the only friend I have here." She was gone when I woke up. Typically, she had left me sleeping on the water tank, knowing fully well the trouble I'd get into.

I walked gingerly down the stairs, my face caked with tears and dust. My father sat in his usual chair, the newspaper held across his face. "We'll talk later," he said as I passed him. I didn't care. No parental admonition was going to rob me of my right to grieve and write terrible poetry and break things. But first, I would get some sleep. On my bed, I found my Dad's Levis, folded clumsily like only he can. I never did make shorts out of them. I had just outgrown my roller skates.       

 "It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time."

 The Virgin Suicides,  Jeffrey Eugenides. 

                 Icy Highs's Music Recco: Rock & Roll Queen by The Subways