I was disappointed. I have cried while reading novels before, but it is not common, and I am always startled and happy when it does happen. So much of novelistic pleasure is, for me, somewhat abstract cerebral, that it feels really strange to be reminded that some part of my mind actually believes that this crazy written-down shit is happening to real people in some real place.

Anyways, I wish that I had, once upon a time, made a list of novels that made me cry. But, alas, I made no such list, and now I cannot remember whether Grapes of Wrath or The Jungle caused any moisture. What I can remember, though, is the first and last books that made me cry.

The first was, I think, near the end of Mercedes Lackey’s By The Sword, where the mercenary captain Kerowyn is coming to the rescue of the beleagured nation of Valdemar, but shit looks totally helpless, and everyone looks like they’re going to die, but people are waiting to die heroically…well, I teared up (I was about eleven). And I remember thinking, “Wow, this is the first time that a book has ever made me cry.” Man, I’ve reread that book so many times, and I still love it.

The last time I cried while reading a novel was about three months ago, on Christmas Day. It was somewhere during the closing chapters of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower: a YA novel about a slightly disturbed high school freshman who makes friends with some totally awesome high school seniors who are like the coolest thing ever, jeez, my eyes are stinging just thinking about it.

Oh, I also just remembered that the first time I cried during a video game was during Phantasy Star IV (for the Sega Genesis), when Alys died. Man, that was so sad. It was such a good death, too. It wasn’t a girlfriend getting refrigerated; it was a powerful female mentor sacrificing her life (Obi-Wan style) to save her naive male mentee.

And the first time I cried during a movie was in Braveheart, when that motherfucking Robert the Bruce betrayed Mel Gibson and lost him the Battle of Falkirk.

Both of these prior two crying incidents were around when I was eleven. I know this because right after I cried while reading By The Sword, I remember stopping and thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what other stuff I’ve cried during. Oh yeah, there was that time during Braveheart….”

I think the lesson here is that the best media-related crying comes either: A) when you’re a kid; or B) while consuming media meant for kids. What times have you cried while consuming cultural product?

However, there was also something kind of trite about the film. In the movie, a thirtysomething screenwriter (a self-described “Hollywood hack”) is visiting Paris with his fiancé. He fights with her during the day (she does not share his ardor for Paris and evinces no interest in his novel-in-progress), and he spends his nights travelling back in time and experiencing 1920s Paris with his literary idols (mostly an incredibly pretentious Hemingway).

The story is basically about how the protagonist, Gil Prender, doesn’t really believe in himself. He’s not sure whether his writing is good. He’s not sure he has what it takes to be a novelist. He came to Paris in his twenties in order to write, but he didn’t trust himself enough to stay. He left, he sold out, and he’s regretted it ever since. I don’t think it can be much of a spoiler to say that at the end of the movie, he rediscovers his confidence in himself.

Now, I won’t say that it’s not important to believe in oneself. Few artists are able to work without a tremendous amount of audacity. But…that audacity is about continuing to work, despite everything and everyone telling you that you should quit. It’s hardly a triumph of audacity when a magical taxi takes you back into the past, and all of your literary heroes befriend you and give you peptalks on what it means to be an artist, and Gertrude Stein and Hemingway read your novel and tell you that you’re awesome.

You’d have to be a huge fool to not stay in Paris and take a serious shot at novel-writing after the universe reorders the fabric of space and time just so you can receive a boost to your literary pretensions.

That’s why this movie is trite. It’s not a real story, it’s a daydream. Oh, of course, Gil comes away from it with some weird lesson about nostalgia and how people should look forward and live in the present and not always be idealizing the past. But that’s dumb. That’s not what the movie is about. The movie is about a man who’s settling for a career he doesn’t want, just because it pays well. It’s about a man who’s settling for a wife he doesn’t love, just because she’s beautiful. And the movie’s answer to these conundrums is for the universe to provide Gil with pretty substantial evidence that he can get any woman he wants and that his writing is spell-binding.

To me, that’s not an interesting story. I’d prefer to watch the opposite of this, a story that has all the fun caricatures of 1920s lions, but none of the bits where those lions repeatedly assure the Woody Allen stand-in that he’s definitely one of them. I’d like to watch a movie about a man who goes back and finds that his (in real life, astonishingly cruel) literary idols think he’s a bore and a fool. I’d like to watch a story about a man who hands his novel to Gertrude Stein and gets told that he has no talent. What does that man do? Does he switch careers? Does he dump his beautiful fiancé?

Anyway, this movie was spectacular. Since there are many far better reviews out there, I’d just like to comment on one aspect. It was terrifying. For much of th. Be movie, I tried to figure out why it was so scary. After all, I knew that Batman was going to win in the end, and that the Joker was going to go to Arkham.

I think it was that the Joker was so callous and indiscriminate. Most super-villains target super-heroes, and only deign to squelch mortals under their feet if the buggers get in the way. But the Joker goes out of his way to hurt ordinary people. Not only that, but when people try to stand up to him, he kills them, effortlessly. Nothing they, or Batman can do, can stop him. And I knew, even while watching, that although Batman would win in the end, it wouldn’t make things right. Gotham would still be screwed up and corrupt, and all those people would still be dead.

Perhaps part of it is also that the Joker didn’t have any particular “plot”. He wasn’t trying to destroy the world. He was just screwing around with people’s minds. So he even if he goes down, he still succeeded in his goal.