Return of Bruce Wayne 5 Preview

Tomorrow, the long-anticipated resumption of Grant Morrison's Batman saga comes with Return of Bruce Wayne #5. This issues comes after a delay of several weeks, but it also follows on build-ups begun during Batman, R.I.P. and even in Infinite Crisis. That crisis provided a soft reboot, allowing the creators (primarily, Morrison) to redefine the terms of Batman's past, so long as nothing drastically changed the present. Instead of beginning this process with a beginning-to-end redefinition, Morrison started by telling a story in the present, as though nothing much had changed, but at irregular intervals, he has served notice that the backstory has already changed -- we can say that it changed with Infinite Crisis, but off-camera. In doing so, he tends to pattern things loosely on older continuity, but with a very free hand to modify whatever he wishes, not only recording a new mythology, but using it to drive a story being told now. (Geoff Johns has followed a similar strategy with Superman, choosing to write an origin that focuses on events that played into his current stories rather than, say, the stories of a few years earlier.)

What makes ROBW #5 central is that we are going to revisit the general timeframe of the Wayne murders. To be specific, Bruce is revisiting that era in person, having arrived not too long after the murders have taken place. The time travel journey of the Omega Sanction is going to give him an opportunity to interact with his own personal past, putting the adult Bruce in a world (of about 1980) where the child Bruce is just beginning a life mission. That Morrison would revisit this time frame had been promised by the flashbacks to the Wayne murders in his 2006-2008 run in Batman. My take, from over a year ago, on how inevitable this chapter of the story was can be seen here. Now that chapter is upon us.

The key story from the past is Detective #235. Morrison has been teasing a return to that story from the time he showed the Thomas Wayne batsuit from that 1956 comic in the first issues of his own run. Now, the preview for ROBW #5 shows that batsuit as the actress Marsha Lamarr asks Bruce to wear it. Very likely, he will wear it for the same reason he wore it in 1956 -- to intimidate the people responsible for the Waynes' deaths into thinking that Thomas has returned, supernaturally, to haunt them.

The 1956 story was itself a retcon of the 1948 story in Batman #47 that showed Batman confronting Joe Chill, the mugger whose unplanned killing of the Waynes set the course of Bruce's life. Detective #235 added the significant detail that a mobster named Lew Moxon hired Chill to settle a score. In both of these stories, Batman confronts the person behind his parents' deaths and the encounter results in the death of the malefactor. Morrison has revisited the first of those stories, that of the gunman Chill, in Batman #673. The last page of RIP hinted that the new Lew Moxon is actually the Black Glove, probably Doctor Hurt himself, who has intriguingly chosen to wear the Thomas Wayne batsuit. Why? As part of demonic worship? Does the cowl have some power? Did it affect Thomas when he wore it, and will it try to do so when Bruce wears it?

The answers, and another step closer to the shadowy backstory of Doctor Hurt himself, may come tomorrow.

Mad Men 412

A line or a circle? Businesses, comic strips, and all human lives have to decide if they see life as a progression or a cycle -- one thing after another, or the same things over and over. There's more than one proverb arguing for each perspective. The last time Charlie Brown tries to kick the football is indistinguishable from the first time. And so it is with addiction and other character flaws. Don's constant inconstancy, Roger's elegant callousness, the firm on the brink of catastrophe. Is Mad Men taking us on a journey or in a circle?

The Heinz man says that "food is cyclical" and he's convinced that beans would inevitably return to the position of dominance that ketchup had taken over, "But I don't have that time. So I want to force the issue." The mid-Sixties was a perilous time to begin waiting for the past to return. Unhappily, for many the rear-looking optimist, the past was not to come back soon or ever.

For an addict, the past is all too certain to repeat. And so this episode brought back Don Draper's first on-air dalliance, Midge Daniels, whose life chose a most unfortunate moment in which to freeze. Once upon a time, Don might have left Betty for Midge. Now Midge is being prostituted out by her husband so one or both of them can get another heroin fix. Midge and her husband disagree on whether he reminds her of Brendan Behan (an incurable Irish drunk who died at 41) or Dylan Thomas (an incurable Welsh drunk who died at 39 -- actually, not far from Midge's apartment). Behan or Thomas -- they have this to look forward to. (Incidentally, for the number-minded fan, the Consumer Price Index lets us calculate that all of the prices for which Don is offered Midge, as well as the massive inconveniences that Pete Campbell faces, tabulate 7-to-1 in today's dollar's.)

Which brings us to Don, who has habits of his own. He's tamed alcohol down to a manageable intake. The explosive potential of his infidelities simmers with bookend shots placing Megan literally between Don and Faye. Don didn't think about his actions leading to the end of his business relationship with Faye, so he certainly didn't think about it outing their personal relationship. When Don calls Megan his bodyguard, he may be giving his future self a line to rue, if Megan proves to be less cool-headed than she was when she promised perfect discretion on their night they had sex in his office. Faye unknowingly provides the same potential when she tells Don to have "his girl" make dinner reservations. (Don may subconsciously have Ted Chaough's prank in mind when he chooses a place the Kennedys used to frequent.)

The overall geometry lesson is clear: When life is bad, you wish it to be a line leading to change. When it is good, you wish it to be a circle. Fate curses you by offering you the opposite. Sally's mental wellness is a line... she shows progress and can start cutting back sessions. Betty's is a circle: She still yearns to see a child psychatrist (even with the comic animals painted on the wall), years after her first psychiatrist fairly or unfairly compared her to a child. In order to break Sally's burgeoning relationship with Glen, she agrees to let the family move to another town. Much earlier, Betty had nurtured Glen's crush, itself a remarkably childish fixation, and the worst Betty has to risk from his contact with Sally would if he told Sally that her mother had confided in him when he was even younger.

Much as that plot resembles The Graduate, the end of the episode will inevitably be compared to Jerry Maguire, with Don's treatise promising higher ideals to the world, infuriating his colleagues (who can't do away with him just yet), and garnering the admiration of both Megan and Peggy as a two-headed stand-in for the Renee Zellweger character. And yet, that comparison is categorically too favorable to Don. What drove Don to write it was not an actual epiphany but a calculated risk that the open letter would be good for business. As the firm faced a vicious cycle (every potential new client believes, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, that the firm will not survive the next few months), Don's letter was an attempt to do as Peggy suggested when she turned Don's words back to him, to "change the conversation." Don can't accept his colleague's criticism, but neither can he Megan's praise. He lets her know that he is interested, as we always have known him to be, in seeming rather than being. And she knew that.

But when we first heard in the voice of his journal that he was quitting tobacco, did we think that he meant he was quitting his personal habit or anything otherwise lofty and not merely making a business move? Did we think that he ripped the binding out of his journal for nothing? The creators are to be commended if we believed that Don was on a line and not a circle, because he had a lit cigarette in his left hand while he spelled high ideals out with his right.

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My previous Mad Men Season Four breakdowns:

Ep 01 Public Relations
Ep 02 Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Ep 03 The Good News
Ep 04 The Rejected
Ep 05 The Chrysanthemum and The Sword
Ep 06 Waldorf Stories
Ep 07 The Suitcase
Ep 08 The Summer Man
Ep 09 The Beautiful Girls
Ep 10 Hands and Knees
Ep 11 Blowing Smoke

Mad Men 411

"Were you lying when you said your career came before everything?" That's a line from 1927's The Jazz Singer, the first "talkie" Hollywood ever made, but it could have fit into just about every scene in "Chinese Wall." Men -- and sometimes women -- sacrificing the rest of their lives for career has been a theme illuminating the series as a whole. But in this episode, it glowed white hot, leaving virtually no one with their non-work life unscathed.

To see Ken Cosgrove walk out of dinner with his fiancée and her parents is to be reminded of Peggy's missed birthday dinner four episodes back. Ken, having at least shown up before hearing the black news about Lucky Strike, walks away without incident. In the next scene, and others throughout the episode, Pete Campbell is called away from his wife's labor. In one of Mad Men's "sign of the times" moments, his father-in-law admits to having been absent from his daughter's birth, and cheerfully excuses Pete to do the same. Perhaps it was excusable for men to be at baseball games while their wives delivered, but Ted Chaough is driven enough to turn up for Pete's wife's delivery so that he can hard-sell Pete with a job offer -- a car and driving lessons included. That work should take precedence over the birth of one's daughter is so taken for granted that when Don accuses Pete of having the delivery as a higher priority, Pete rebuts the accusation instead of accepting and defending it.

Screenwriter Erin Levy adds a deliberate "from the cradle to the grave" universality by showing the SCDP men trying to save their business with a mercenary approach to David Montgomery's funeral. They whisper strategy between eulogies, and that the event is for them purely a work event is highlighted when Megan asks Don how the funeral went and Don, thinking of business, not reincarnation, replies, "We'll see."

Birth and death fall by the wayside. Naturally, so does love. Don without hesitation asks Faye to break the titular "Chinese Wall" of confidentiality that should keep her from using her insider status to help Don, her lover. After Don makes his Jazz Singer confession that his career "is everything to me", Faye becomes the episode's lonely mouthpiece for the alternative perspective, saying, "I know the difference between what we have and a stupid office." Eventually, she recants, and gives Don an "in" with one of her other clients. And in the betrayal that makes her regard for Don painful to behold, we get a suggestion that Sex -- for Don, following up the lingering gaze he held on Megan last episode -- actually does trump Work even though Birth, Death, and Love do not. In Megan, he may have found his perfect woman -- one who wants him to go home and sleep alone after they are done for the evening. And his flirtation with truthfulness may have received its own eulogy when, undoing the ending of "The Suitcase", he asks Peggy to shut the door to his office.

Roger joins Don as a man who betrays the love of the beautiful woman in his life. In fact, he betrays two, keeping his dark secret from Joan until he begs for the consolation that she can't give. This feeds Joan's best line of the series thus far, "I'm not a solution to your problems. I'm another problem." Soon enough, Roger burns with Bert's brutal but accurate assessment of him inside as his wife Jane (who poses when nobody else is around) lovingly presents him with his now bitterly ironic autobiography in hardcover. (How many copies will this book sell? Ten? Five?) He signs Jane's copy with the agonizingly specific, "To my loving wife", with no comment about loving her back.

Once again, Peggy has hope of being the moral survivor in this dark world. She finds love with Abe despite the fact that his leftism may endanger her role as a cog in the corporate machine. But she has more experience than most people in juggling work and non-work: Stan's pass at her leaves him in need, again, of reading material to cover the sight of his lap, and later asking her, with double entendre he does not intend, "No hard feelings?"

Is there hope for the men of SCDP? Don doesn't see it when his shifty eyes look past the loving and trusting Faye before he nuzzles her hair. Maybe it's there in the eulogies for David Montgomery, who felt that his daughter and not the Buick account was the best thing he ever did. Then again, why are all of the stories about the late Mr. Montgomery about his work?

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My previous Mad Men Season Four breakdowns:

Ep 01 Public Relations
Ep 02 Christmas Comes But Once a Year
Ep 03 The Good News
Ep 04 The Rejected
Ep 05 The Chrysanthemum and The Sword
Ep 06 Waldorf Stories
Ep 07 The Suitcase
Ep 08 The Summer Man
Ep 09 The Beautiful Girls
Ep 10 Hands and Knees