(7/3/09)
I went into Appointment in Crime Alley expecting to despise it. I used to view it as a manipulative waste of time, certainly not worthy of the acclaim it receives from fans of the series who simply can't get past references to the death of Bruce's parents. And yet the James-Lange Theory of emotion got the better of me this time around. Once over, I felt goose bumps, unsure exactly why or how the ending invoked such a powerful physical reaction in me. I can only attempt to retrospectively explore what it is about Appointment in Crime Alley that strikes me as so genuine in the face of so much cloying liberal sentimentality.
The story is based on the worn out idea of the amoral corporation using underhanded methods to tear down a poor neighborhood to construct a mini-mall, the most blatant, and therefore ineffective, decrying of the egoistic power that often goes hand in hand with capitalism. Multiple times we are told how much crime is bred in Crime Alley, and multiple times we are as good as lectured as to the magnitude of Roland Daggett's odiousness. Leslie Thompkins, the kindly woman who helped young Bruce Wayne after the death of his parents, is finally introduced, and yet she is reduced to the demeaning role of the damsel in distress, only filling up precious space to alert the gullible audience to how much of a personal episode this is, or at least how many sappy, overbearing veneers the writers can lavish onto it.
And yet once these tired clichés are begrudgingly accepted, a lot of little qualities emerge. There is the insistence on Batman's comic multitasking and the sense of pressure inherent to such a lifestyle as the Caped Crusader stops a runaway cable-car and prevents a home break-in. The most apparent strength is the atmosphere injected into the design of Crime Alley, interspersed with skewed and expressionistic silhouetted backdrops, the littered streets and shabby buildings imposing their stark angular designs and an inexplicable sense of geography cooly coming to light. Somehow, I started impassively drawing for myself a blueprint of the neighborhood and eventually came to see Crime Alley as a world all its own, an abstract enclosed Langian subspace.
The ending constructs the illusion of serious drama and more or less succeeds. Roland Daggett may be the generic evil tycoon, but he may very well stand as some kind of representative of 'evil' for the fulfillment of the ending's purpose. In having him get off scot-free at the end, after the construction of such a clear-cut moral divergence, Conway almost redeems his previous mishaps by manipulatively infuriating the audience, demolishing initial expectations that wrong will be righted with a bitter conclusion. This is not a predictable getaway for a recurring villain or the aftermath of a shady deal that simply cannot be exposed; this is an acknowledgement of gangsterism and corruption in society that makes a spectacle of Daggett's wrongdoing, sadly notes the overwhelming populist opposition, and then has him coldly drive off with the peripheral hellish tints of the fire tinted in the windows. Thompkins finally plays an important role in maternally placating Batman, his furious outbursts rendering him almost childlike in his frustration.
Appointment in Crime Alley runs amok with convenient archetypes and patronizing liberal didacticism, but it also leaves a frustrating aftertaste similar to that left by the ending of Chinatown. However, even though both Batman and Jake Gittes are restrained from intervention, the serialized nature of the series indicates that Batman has not been paralyzed into passive acceptance, but will have another chance to win the day.
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