What Is John Blake Supposed to Be?

Bleeding Cool’s Between the Pages vlog has offered a friendly video discussion between editor Grace Randolph and superhero-fashion blogger Alan Kistler on the history of Robins, with particular attention to the latest iterations in comics (Damian Wayne), videogames (Tim Drake in a hoodie), and movies (Det. John Blake).

The thorough discussion proceeds along standard lines, with a lot of familiar imagery. It’s interesting to see how comics fans’ perception of changes can differ based on when they encounter them. For example, Kistler points out a couple of times that the dark, gritty original Batman lasted less than a year in the comics in 1939-40. However, the conversation leaves the impression that Batman went through an extended period of grimness after Jason Todd’s death at the end of 1988.

In fact, it was only a few months before Tim Drake came on the scene as a new Robin—DC had already put out a call for that character. I suspect that Kistler was then reading monthly installments as a young adolescent, and that period felt much longer.

It’s also notable what assumptions Randolph’s presentation makes about how fans view Robins:

Joseph Gordon Levitt is Robin and/or Nightwing in The Dark Knight Rises 2012. But is his John Blake supposed to be Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, or Tim Drake? . . . And do you think Joseph Gordon Levitt is meant to become the next Batman, Robin, or Nightwing?

John Blake exists in a universe in which [***SPOILERS***] French arch-detective Henri Ducard and ancient Mideastern assassin Ra’s al Ghul are the same person, in which Lucius Fox knows his employer’s biggest secret, and in which—the biggest change of all—Bruce Wayne is willing to retire from being the Caped Crusader.

There’s no reason that unfamiliar universe has to contain a Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, or any other character from other tellings of the Batman mythos. Blake is a new character, displaying the narrative essence of the Robin character and a few similarities with previous incarnations, but entirely independent.

Will Blake become Batman or Nightwing (the latter having no precedent in that universe)? I don’t think it matters. A big theme of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy is the value of the Batman (or Harvey Dent) as a symbol of bravery and hope for Gotham City. Blake’s [***MORE SPOILERS, but nothing that’s not in the video***] departure from the police force and entrance into the cave at the end of The Dark Knight Rises promise that he’ll do something with those resources—and implicitly that he might inspire someone else in turn. But exactly what? We’ll never know.

ADDENDUM: Additional commentary from Caleb at Every Day Is Like Wednesday.

Robin Controversies, part 2

This extended version of the weekly Robin is brought to us by the letters B, I, and N.

Best Robin. GrayHaven Comics asked fans to vote on who was the best Robin. This question comes up often in fan forums, and perhaps we should consider what the Robins themselves might say.

I imagine that the second Jason Todd would refuse to participate, and the final results would therefore be four votes for Dick Grayson, one for Damian Wayne (his own), and one for Tim Drake (Dick’s vote).

Iconic Robin. TV Guide ran a preview of the Smallville comic book being scripted by Bryan Q. Miller, which will introduce Batman into that quirky version of the Superman myth. It showed a young woman as Batman’s partner, Nightwing. The article made clear that in that character Miller was writing a new version of Stephanie Brown.

At some point, however, DC’s top editors asked Miller to change plans, and that Nightwing is now Barbara Gordon, elsewhere known as Batgirl or Oracle. Fans of Stephanie Brown were upset, and a great deal of energy has gone into parsing the back-and-forth on DC’s extempore statements and excuses that the company wanted to use the most “iconic” or widely recognized versions of its characters.

This kerfuffle wouldn’t even be a kerfuffle if the comics industry and fan culture hadn’t come to depend on seeing “previews” of works in progress. If this issue of Smallville had simply hit the newsstands (not that there are those anymore, a major factor in the current marketing methods), then people could just have gotten excited at a new use of the Nightwing trademark and the Barbara Gordon name.

As it is, the only source of Milller’s writing about Stephanie Brown is the three volumes of his Batgirl series. And the last volume includes one striking page of Stephanie as Nightwing. It’s very satisfying work.

New Robin. In the national effort to dissect the enjoyable, impressive mess of The Dark Knight Rises, even Time, Forbes, and of course MTV have weighed in on possible futures for the character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

I don’t think it gives away too much about The Dark Knight Rises to say that Gordon-Levitt plays a beat cop who’s figured out that Bruce Wayne was the Batman. He reveals that early in the movie. Did Officer John Blake observe the Batman in action when he was a child, as Tim Drake did? Did he stumble across important information in his work? Is he an especially brilliant investigator? The movie never says.

But in a series that digs into the compromises made by Wayne, his butler Alfred, his comrade Commissioner Jim Gordon, his love interest Selina Kyle, and many others, one thing stands out about Gordon-Levitt’s character: John Blake isn’t evil. He’s the voice of uncompromising integrity and perseverance. Along with his relative youth, that makes him the movie’s stand-in for Robin, and the final minutes explore that possibility further, with the symbolic message clear but the details ambiguous.

Perhaps lost in the shuffle is how the coming-of-age figure in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films isn’t any version of Robin but is Bruce Wayne himself. Batman Begins is of course an origin story. The Dark Knight Rises, more closely tied to that first movie than to The Dark Knight, returns to the question of how Bruce Wayne can become a successful adult. What part does being the Batman play in his growth? Is the Dark Knight a stage, a dead end (literally), or all that an adult man can be?

OIP Derangement Syndrome: The Dark Knight Rises Edition

In 1993, Dennis O’Neil and the Batman team at DC Comics envisioned a long story of the Dark Knight meeting his match and having to retire from crime-fighting for a while. This story got the overall title of Knightfall.

What villain would be worthy of breaking Batman’s back? As with the concurrent “Death of Superman” storyline, the company thought that job called for a completely new character. Writer Chuck Dixon and artist Graham Nolan came up with Bane. He wore the full-face mask of a Mexican luchador wrestler and pumped himself up with a steroid-like drug called “venom” (thus making his victory over Batman a cheat). The name Bane reflects the character’s function within Knightfall: he was the bane of Batman’s existence and his name an abridgement of “Bruce Wayne.”

Knightfall led to a character named Azrael taking over as Batman and going crazy with great power and responsibility, to the Robin solo series, and eventually to Dick Grayson wearing the cape and cowl for a while in Batman: Prodigal. It remains one of the most popular Batman sagas, recently reprinted.

Bane has also remained a formidable villain. He’s smart as well as muscular, and knows Bruce Wayne’s secret. His upbringing, as a poor boy in a horrible prison, is the mirror image of Wayne’s privilege and creates natural sympathy. In subsequent stories, Bane teamed up with the Batman family. After Batman appeared to die, he even toyed with the possibility of taking the Caped Crusader’s place.

The character of Bane has also appeared in other media, including nearly all the DC television cartoons, several videogames, and the 1997 Batman and Robin movie. A few years ago, writer-director Christopher Nolan decided to make Bane, as played by Tom Hardy, one of the main villains of his highly-anticipated The Dark Knight Rises, opening today.

Earlier this week right-wing commentators began to speculate about what that character’s visibility might mean to the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, until 2002 the chief executive and sole stockholder of Bain Capital.

Dixon, a vocal political conservative, wrote on his website that any connection was “Ridiculous…Tho’ I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach that Rush may pick up on this.” (Dixon gave similar comments to Comicbook.com.)

And indeed Rush Limbaugh felt the need to comment on Bane. One might think that he’d feel some affinity for a drug-dependent character, or notice that the story of a heroic multimillionaire might make moviegoers more willing to admire Romney.

Instead, Limbaugh let his paranoia flow. “Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bane?” he asked, according to his own transcript. He declared that “a lot of brain-dead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd” would indeed connect Bane and Bain when they voted. “You may think it's ridiculous, I’m just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama team is lining up.”

Of course, this conspiracy theory has no historical or logical basis. Limbaugh could have easily dismissed it. But he couldn’t resist any chance to say bad things about President Barack Obama. As has been clear for years now, the racist blowhard suffers from OIP Derangement Syndrome.

Who Would Win in a Debate—Batman or the Avengers?

The hype for the new Avengers movie (especially in the Boston Globe) has gotten so loud that it’s starting to make me forget the Kree-Skrull War. One item stood out: Alyssa Rosenberg’s brief essay at Think Progress:

I’m excited to see an intellectual debate between [The Dark Knight Rises] and The Avengers. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies have always had an element of monkish sacrifice to them: to be an impactful superhero, Bruce Wayne’s had to surrender his true public image (in the first film, he acts the playboy to disguise his intentions), the love of his life and of the populace, and now, it’s implied, either his life or his physical health. . . .

The Marvel franchise, and The Avengers in particular (without spoiling anything), take the opposite tack. Its superheroes become better individuals more closely drawn to their communities for their experiences as superheroes. . . .

These two movies are going to make serious bank for their studios. But taken together, they’re also a vigorous argument about superheroism.

And the superhero genre is usually, I’d say, an exploration about what it means to be a hero, writ large and acted out while kicking other largely symbolic characters in the face.

The debate that Rosenberg envisions is, we should note, between Marvel’s mightiest team and Batman, not DC’s hero lineup or outlook. One theme of Kurt Busiek and George Pérez’s two-company crossover of the Justice League and the Avengers back in 2003-04 was the Marvel heroes’ surprise and suspicion that the DC team was so comfortable with popular acclaim. In that case the Avengers stood for “monkish sacrifice,” for doing the right thing without expecting praise or popularity. The Justice League was their world’s mightiest law-enforcement organization.

But Batman changes the equation. Since the 1980s the Dark Knight has stood apart from most of his DC Universe colleagues because of his lack of attention to social niceties and preference to work alone (albeit with a large “family” of supporters and protégés). Nolan’s movies give Bruce Wayne two in-the-know father figures (Alfred and Lucius Fox), but no other surviving confidants.

That Batman would fit with several of Marvel’s heroes as Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and colleagues originally conceived of them: the Hulk is an anti-hero, Spider-Man an outsider, and so on. He wouldn’t get the modern Tony Stark, also a billionaire playboy but one who’s told the world that he’s Iron Man.

Best Metaphor of the Summer

From David Denby's review of The Dark Knight in The New Yorker, on the film's pounding soundtrack:

At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Catch Us If You Can

I call it "Dave Clark Five marketing." Back in January 1964 (not that I was around then), the Beatles had held the top spot on the UK singles chart for many weeks with "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand." But after a while, nearly every teenager in Britain owned those records, and their sales and airplay faded.

The Dave Clark Five's "Glad All Over" happened to be the single peaking best that week, with good but not phenomenal sales. But immediately that group's record label crowed that the "Tottenham sound" had beaten the "Liverpool sound." The group was brought to the US as the Beatles' main rivals, and were successful here, too. Now I like the Dave Clark Five's sound a lot when I'm in the right mood, but history has shown that group was no rival to the Beatles in either creativity or sustained sales. Despite all the hype, as shown by the magazine cover above preserved at the Ward-o-Matic.

We see the same phenomenon in publishing after a huge bestseller's numbers start to slide. Once everyone in the world has bought the latest Harry Potter novel, then of course its sales taper, and whatever novel is posting the best above-average numbers will be said to have "knocked Harry Potter off the top of the bestseller list."

This week's example was a raft of headlines announcing that Tropic Thunder had toppled The Dark Knight from the top of the movie box office charts. Ben Stiller's comedy earned $26 million on its first weekend while the Batman movie earned $17 million on its fifth, so Tropic Thunder's marketers got to boast of being number one.

Two weeks ago, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor earned $40 million in its opening weekend, and the week before that Stepbrothers took in nearly $31 million. Because The Dark Knight was still raking in huge amounts of cash then, neither of those movies got to be number one, but any studio accountant would prefer their opening weekends to Tropic Thunder's.

And don't get me started about this Monday's other box-office-based stories that The Dark Knight has overtaken Star Wars in total domestic box office revenue. When we adjust for inflation, as we must when comparing dollar figures from different years, Gone with the Wind remains unsurpassed as the all-time box-office moneymaker. The Dark Knight is #39 and gaining on Beverly Hills Cop, Cleopatra, and Pinocchio.

Lucius Fox: In the Know

Yesterday I discussed how The Dark Knight uses the character of Alfred Pennyworth differently from how he first appeared in the Batman comics, back in 1943. Today I'll talk about the movie's approach to another supporting character, but this one goes back only to 1979.

Lucius Fox was introduced into the comics that year as a talented corporate executive who ran Bruce Wayne's corporation and foundation for him so he could sleep off his late nights chasing criminals as a vapid playboy. Fox is African-American, and his arrival expanded the "Batman family" beyond White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

In the comics, Fox's acumen lies in managing corporations and managing money. He even built Dick Grayson's small inheritance from his parents into enough money that the young man could live apart from Wayne Manor and buy the circus where he grew up.

Batman Begins, the first of the new Batman movies directed by Christopher Nolan, gave Fox a new role: chief inventor of Batman's stuff. He's an engineer at Wayne Enterprises, unfairly shunted aside by a usurping CEO. Fox slips Bruce some of the technology that helps him become Batman, and eventually Bruce makes him the new head of the company.

The comic-book Lucius Fox has yet to tumble to his boss's secrets (or at least he has yet to let on that he has). Once Hollywood cast Morgan Freeman in that role, however, audiences wouldn't believe that he'd remain that ignorant. After all, he's the industry's current choice to play God. (A very long way from holding cue cards as Marcello on The Electric Company.)

Therefore, The Dark Knight shows Lucius Fox as fully cognizant of Bruce Wayne's activities. In essence, he's a second Alfred. Which brings me to this New York Post interview with Freeman:

What's the secret to making a superhero movie?

You gotta make the superhero believable. Batman is not super. He has extensive training in order to be able to do what he's doing. What made "Batman Begins" work is that you saw how he begins. He's not bitten by a spider or bathed in atomic rays or anything. The guy was trained in a certain art. That's very believable.

Part of that believability is also that Batman is disturbed.

He is. This is one of the things the new movie brings out. He sees his path, and he knows the price he pays for it. His mentors, the people watching over him, are saying, "You're getting into dangerous territory here."

Alfred Pennyworth: Replacing Robin since 1986

I find myself in the midst of a little series of Dark Knight postings, yet it's time for the weekly Robin. Oh, what to do? I'll discuss how the Batman mythos we see in the new movies, as well as the previous movie series that started in 1989, manage to get along fine without a Robin.

Bruce Wayne's original supporting cast in the Batman comics consisted of Police Commissioner James Gordon, introduced in the very first story, and Julie Madison, Bruce's fiancée. Neither of those characters knew his secret identity as the Batman (or "the Bat-Man," as it was originally written). Julie eventually disappeared.

When the creative team introduced Dick Grayson in 1940, they didn't simply lower the average age of the cast. They also added a character who knew about Bruce Wayne's nocturnal activities and helped him. In the late 1960s, Batman co-creator Bill Finger described his thinking to comics artist and historian Jim Steranko:

Robin was an outgrowth of a conversation I had with Bob [Kane, the artist]. As I said, Batman was a combination of [Douglas] Fairbanks and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had his Watson. The thing that bothered me was that Batman didn't have anyone to talk to, and it got a little tiresome always having him thinking. I found that as I went along Batman needed a Watson to talk to. That's how Robin came to be.

(Eventually I'll analyze this some more in a subseries I'll call "reasons for Robin.")

In 1943, the Batman team added another supporter to the Batman team: Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne's butler. As originally written, Alfred looked like a portly Arthur Treacher, but that same year a Hollywood serial portrayed the character as thin and mustachioed, so the comic-book butler went off to a spa and returned with less weight and more facial hair. (Cover at left courtesy of the Grand Comics Database.)

Alfred was originally comic relief, with a broad ethnic dialect. His shtick was wishing to be a great detective but achieving results--such as discovering his employer's secret identity--only through dumb luck. Later writers portrayed Alfred as actually smart and capable, with a background in British intelligence and the theater which had left him with very useful disguise skills.

And thus things remained (with a odd break in the 1960s that I've decided not to acknowledge) until DC Comics's Crisis in 1986. The company rewrote the origins of some of its major characters. For Batman, the big change involved Alfred. Now, the comic books told us, he had been a servant in the Wayne household when Bruce was a boy. He (and a local physician, Leslie Thompkins, introduced into the mythos in 1976) had cared for young Bruce after his parents were shot.

In other words, Alfred--not Dick Grayson--was Batman's oldest friend and assistant. He still had a theatrical and intelligence background, and he turned out to have another skill necessary in those darker times: combat surgeon. With Dick off with the Titans as Nightwing and the Robin situation in flux, Alfred became Bruce Wayne's most constant aide and confidant--in short, his Watson.

In all Batman stories since 1986, Alfred knows Bruce's secrets, perhaps better than the master himself. He offers snarky comments about Bruce's Batman habit, but in the end is what the recovery movement would label an enabler. He has helped to raise the orphan boys Bruce keeps bringing home, and assisted them on their own adventures. At a few points, Alfred even left Wayne Manor to reconnect with family in Britain or to look after Tim Drake at boarding school.

The 1989 Batman movie directed by Tim Burton and the 2005 Batman Begins directed by Christopher Nolan both adopted DC's "post-Crisis" history of Alfred. Even more than comic books, which at least had the option of thought balloons, moviemakers need sounding-boards for their heroes to talk to. And as long as Alfred is there for those conversations--particularly as depicted by a movie legend like Michael Caine--Robin doesn't have to be.

Renee Montoya and Anna Ramirez

There's a character in the Batman mythos named Renee Montoya. She was created as a Gotham City police officer for the animated cartoon of the early 1990s, and quickly slipped into the comic books to tie the two media together. Montoya served several roles in those early stories, from providing Batman with a regular contact on the cops to offering a non-stereotypical role for a female and Hispanic.

Soon Commissioner Jim Gordon promoted Montoya to detective and assigned her to the Major Crimes Unit. Over the years her partners were Harvey Bullock and Crispus Allen, two other established DC supporting characters. Two-Face developed a crush on her in the No Man's Land arc.

Montoya was a major character in the Gotham Central series, which revealed more of her personal life: she had a girlfriend, and parents who disapproved of that relationship. Some fans disliked this revelation, seeing it as changing the character they'd imagined rather than filling her out. For others, Montoya became even more interesting and admirable.

In a series that DC published in 2006, Montoya took up the role of the Question, a superhero Steve Ditko had created for Charlton in 1967 as a mouthpiece for his Ayn Rand philosophy. (The Question became part of the DC stable when Charlton sold its superhero properties.) I've written about how this development exemplifies the dominance of costumed-hero adventures in American comic books.

I mention all this because early on in the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, we see a young Latina detective working closely with Jim Gordon. She's played by Monique Curnen. More than a few Batman fans assumed that she was Montoya, as I did. Only late in the film do we learn that her name is Ramirez.

Earlier this month, Joanne at Comic Genius wrote about why the character of Det. Anna Ramirez was appearing not only in The Dark Knight but also in an animated film just released to DVD, Batman: Gotham Knight. Where was Montoya? she demanded.

The answer becomes clear once one sees The Dark Knight. [And now we get into ***SPOILER*** territory for people who haven't.] The screenwriters, Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, undoubtedly used the sight of a Latina detective to lure fans into thinking that character was Montoya, and would behave as Montoya has behaved in numerous Batman stories since 1991. But Ramirez acts differently, providing a surprise for the cocky fanboys who think they can predict everything the Joker will do. The filmmakers could pull off that trick only because they were working within an established universe with a big fan base.

At the same time, having built Renee Montoya into a heroine and even a costumed heroine, DC and Warner Bros. got to preserve that character free of whatever fate Anna Ramirez might face.

Poetry Friday: The Original Dark Knights

Marc Tyler Nobleman, author of the recent Boys of Steel, wrote about his disappointment that the new movie The Dark Knight didn’t credit Bill Finger with having first applied that title phrase to the Batman in Detective Comics, #40. Finger had created the character with artist Bob Kane a few months before, and wrote many Batman scripts from the 1930s through the 1960s, almost always uncredited.

Marc’s posting made me curious about where the phrase “dark knight” originally came from. Finger was obviously trying to evoke our cultural memories of the Middle Ages, just as one of the supposed inspirations for Robin was Robin Hood. A little searching for “dark knight” in Google Books’s “Full Texts” database led me to the British literary scene of the early 1800s, a time of medieval revivalism. So for Poetry Friday here are the two earliest examples of the “dark knight” that I could find.

The Anglo-Irish writer Charles Maturin (1782-1824) used the phrase in his play Bertram; or The Castle of St. Aldobrand (1816). A prior describes an off-stage character this way:

The dark knight of the forest,
So from his armour named and sable helm,
Whose unbarred vizor mortal never saw.
He dwells alone; no earthly thing lives near him,
Save the hoarse raven croaking o’er his towers,
And the dank weeds muffling his stagnant moat.

It turns out this dark knight is a personification of the devil, who corrupts Bertram. Walter Scott, Byron, and other top writers of the day admired Maturin's play. (In fact, it’s easier to find Scott’s review quoting this scene than to find a copy of the play itself.) Maturin knew that he had a good thing because he also used the phrase “dark knight” in his 1824 novel The Albigenses.

Maturin was never able to match the quality of Bertram, however. He overspent his income, got into quarrels with critics, and died (possibly a suicide) after a literary career of less than a decade.

Later, a Scottish poet named Henry Glassford Bell (1803-1874) wrote a ballad named “The Dark Knight” in pseudo-medieval style. It was first published in 1830 in The Edinburgh Literary Review, which Bell happened to edit. The poem is more easily read here in Bell’s collection Summer and Winter Hours.

Here’s the story in a nutshell:

There came a dark knight from a far countrie,
And no one ever saw his face, for he
Wore his black vizor down continuallie.

He came to a gay bridal, where the bride
Stood, in rich robes, her destined lord beside,
Who gazed upon her with a joyful pride.
...
Yet ever and anon her look would fall
On the dark knight who stood apart from all,
Dark as his shadow, moveless on the wall.
...
The hour grows late, and one by one depart
The guests, with bounding step and merry heart,--
Methought I saw that new wed ladie start.

None in her father’s hall are left but she
And her young bridegroom, who, as none may see,
Hath twined his arm around her lovinglie.

Yes, there is still a third,--the vizor’d knight,--
...
A shriek was heard at midnight, such as broke
On every ear, like the first pealing stroke
Of the alarm bell, and the sleepers woke!

In the old hall, where fitful moonlight shone,
There lay the bridegroom and the bride alone,
Pale, dead, and cold as monumental stone,--
A vizor’d helm was near, but the dark knight was gone.

Obviously, both Maturin’s and Bell’s dark knights are villains. Finger and Kane created the Batman as either a hero or an anti-hero, depending on the editorial direction. Nonetheless, Bell’s poem provides interesting commentary on the new movie’s love triangle among Bruce Wayne, his childhood friend Rachel Dawes (who has no equivalent in the comics), and district attorney Harvey Dent.

(The thumbnail above shows the determined Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, as rendered in “plush with removeable limbs,” courtesy of Geek Venue's Monty Python Toys collection.)

Why So Serious?

In today's Boston Globe, Ty Burr writes:

On Sunday I went to a memorial service in Mount Auburn Cemetery for the sister of a family friend. Afterward, as the group milled around drinking iced tea and eating finger food under a small tent next to the chapel, word got out among the teenagers and college kids that there was a movie critic present. One by one, they came up to me and asked the same question, with almost the same wording.

Is "The Dark Knight" the best movie of all time?

Burr goes on, but at that point my own responses were:

• No. It's a very good superhero movie. But compared to The Bicycle Thief or From Here to Eternity or The General (to name just a few), it's an amplified thrill ride featuring two-dimensional characters.
  
• At a memorial service? I hope the deceased was either a movie fan or a Batman fan. Otherwise, entertainment about a mass-murdering crazy man seems like the wrong topic for the occasion.

Burr has some interesting points on the rare combination of factors that--for some people--imbue this superhero movie with more emotional resonance than any other. Or, seemingly, than any other event of recent memory.

Go ahead and scoff at the analogy, boomers, but one of the kids at the memorial service likened the opening of "Dark Knight" to the JFK assassination and the Challenger disaster as quintessential where-were-you defining moments of his generation.

Good to know the kids are getting over that little "destruction of the World Trade Center" thing.