Anatomy of a Performance

Well, this won't be all that. But I did catch Heath Ledger's movie Batman Begins yesterday. It was my first viewing. And I was not disappointed.

As with everyone else I'm sure I experienced that strange, woe feeling. You admire the performance, but ask "Is this what killed him?" And is it worth it to always put 1,000 percent of your energy into a work for which you will be known? For this I admire him still and can use as fuel. As can you.

It was like watching a stand up comic who is really, really good. And the way they push you and push you until you are completely in their arms waiting for the next weird place you were going to go. I cannot explain it any other way. Seeing that Dent campaign sticker on Joker's nurses outfit was especially great.

As a fellow viewer pointed out...He could have worn anything, but he chose a nurses outfit.
The method, indeed, he will be missed.

For director's address I'm with Manohla Dhargis who called that sunrise shot of Heath flapping his mop into the bright light purple air out of a police car is a masterpiece of the framing kind.

I did notice something in the voice characteristics that seemed like he may have gotten from seeing Tom Waits live. The way Tom Wait's nerdy, sooty, adolescent deepness quirkily navigates a joke in On The Road from his latest collection Orphans. There are a lot of strange ticks in his, as I've read it from clever critics, punk rock performance, of which the Waits influence may be one. There's a little androgyny, a little Clockwork Orange, a little Deniro in the stalking moments.

We can call Heath's Joker the ultimate Orphan, or juvenile delinquient. A mad genius boy who has been kicked too many times, shunted to the back of the pizza line, neglected by his parents, and fallen into the aegis of unsupervised academia and devious strategy. There is always something of the boy in his performance. And those are the boy who take guns to school and pore over maps to make it effecient and to put the indifferent layman in these horrible, ethically compromising situations.

Never did I feel like I was watching a comic book character, but a very real and sad unwanted byproduct of hostile American society. Those other Batman films succeeded in caricature. This in the gruesome reality of times we, it seems, can't shy away from anymore.