Sighs.
Apparently I'm trying to turn this into the Most Under-Qualified Comics Blog on the Internets.
I haven't yet seen The Dark Knight. I very very much want to. I want to enjoy it to a degree that's almost painful and probably guarantees disappointment; the last film I wanted to see this badly, The Departed, was a monumental let down because, basically, it wasn't the best movie I'd ever seen. It's a good, strong film, but it should have been my favorite movie of all time (that cast, that setting, that subject matter, that director). What I do want to express to the void, here, are two reactions I have to the cycle of reading online reviews and then reading comments on them.
(1) You cannot post a negative review of the movie, even a mildly critical one, without being flooded by, literally, dozens to hundreds of comments, about half of them anonymous, from people who by and large have never previously commented on your blog. It's really upsetting, especially because these comments so routinely whirl around nothing but insult and idiocy. If you wrote a negative review of the movie it's because you're trying to get attention for being contrary, or because you know nothing about film and aren't qualified to be a reviewer, possibly both. It's also quite likely that you abused your thesaurus in the composition of your "review" and aren't aware that masturbating over the dictionary doesn't constitute film criticism.
You think I'm joking about the characterization here; I'm not. This is the clearest example yet of the various iterations of the equation that "normal person + opinion + internet + anonymity = fuckwad."
(2) Many of the reviews evince some levels of ignorance about Batman or the history of the character and his characterization. There are a lot of reviews which seem to question the darkness of the film (often in relation to the question I'm still not getting into about the value of trying to make superhero comics realistic and/or take them seriously) or question the presentation of the character. Look: for better or worse there is no unitary "Batman" characterization. The character first appeared in May, 1939, and in the 69 years of publication history since then there have been at least five major interpretations presented in the comics, let alone the tie-in media:
(a) Batman as ruthless vigilante in pulp crime stories w/semi-frequent supernatural overtones. This is the character as introduced in 1939, a Batman who occasionally kills people (!) and on a regular basis semi-advertantly causes their deaths, and is happy to watch them die without helping them (!!!). The comics are crude and brightly colored, but the morality on display here is, somewhat childishly, much darker than any presentation of the character since. I've just bought a book that collects the first year or so of Batman stories; I haven't yet gotten to the first issue of Batman itself, which introduces the Joker, but I'm running through his initial appearances in Detective Comics. In the first ten stories (including one two-parter for eleven different appearances) he: knocks a guy into an acid tank which almost certainly kills him, kicks another dude off a roof, may or may not kill someone when he snares their neck with a lasso, breaks a guy's neck with a kick, kills two vampires, is semi-responsible for someone getting killed by a death-ray, causes someone's plane to crash into a bay, where it presumably kills him, causes a guy's car to crash and go over the side of a bridge, presumably killing him, throws a man onto another man's sword which may or may not kill him, throws a small but heavy statue at a guy's head which knocks him out a window and kills him, allows someone to get stabbed to death so he doesn't blow his cover, and punches a dude so hard that he falls backward onto a sword which had previously been run through a door. That's, in the most expansive counting, thirteen deaths (including the vampires) that are directly or indirectly Batman's fault in one year of publication, which is probably more deahts of that sort than appeared in all the Batman comics of the 60s combined. I'm glad Batman was revised away from being the sort of guy who's happy to punch a guy into a vat of acid and call it "a fitting end for his kind" - the dialogue isn't so much with the goodness, here - but there are dark, dark roots to the character.
(b) Batman as campy adventurer with lots of supernatural/silly foes. This was a big influence on the Adam West TV show, dominated much of the 50s, and this is where everything Batman uses has a Bat-prefix, he's got a Bat-dog, etc. All but one or two of the Batman comics I read as a kid were originally my dad's, and half of those fell into this category.
(c) Batman as the world's greatest detective, in somewhat more grounded stories with a darker tone but still relatively kid-appropriate. The fantasy aspects as such are cut way back and there's a lot of Batman saying things like, "Hmm, this tire tread can only be found on Ford automobiles manufactured between 1957 and 1959!" Subsequent Batman-as-detective representations sadly tend to get away from the investigative heritage the creators, especially in this era, had him share with Holmes and Poirot, and for the past twenty years his detective skills are largely based on knowing who to beat up for information which will lead him to the next guy out of whom he can beat some knowledge. This presentation was prevalent in the 60s and maybe the 70s, and constitutes much of the rest of the comics I read as a kid.
(d) Batman as superhero in the DC tradition of superheroes; this is a thread that runs throughout the history of the character, but probably came to the fore in the 70s, which was apparently (I'm less personally familiar with this era) when the character started being brought out of the confines of Gotham and made more of a worldwide figure. Though not superpowered, this is the Batman who's on par with Superman and Wonder Woman inside the fictional world of the comics, and though I just said he came to the fore in the 1970s, this is also how I think of the Batman who showed up in various crossover, Justice League type titles. Comics genius Grant Morrison refers to this Bruce Wayne as a globetrotting hairy-chested love god. My personal take on Batman is a combination of (c) and (d) with a judicious smattering of:
(e) Frank Miller's Batman, and the semi-regrettable twenty years of post-Miller influence that have largely dominated the character since. This is an attempt to take Batman dark dark dark again. And he is dark - if we think of what I've said about talking the comics seriously and at face value, what happened to Bruce Wayne is superdark, and the decision to funnel his rage into a hopeless quest to defeat Crime in the abstract speaks to some serious mental imbalances.* However, Frank Miller's monumental The Dark Knight Returns - which is not a story set in the DC continuity - is about a Batman at the end of his life, and even Miller himself seems to have ignored that going forward. Batman in TDKR is broken and bitter and nasty, because he's been choking on his own rage for at least the decade since he "retired". There's no reason to believe that this is what he was like thirty years ago, but that's the direction the character was taken in the wake of this story. The idea becomes that Batman is the real man and Bruce Wayne is the alter-ego, and the many voices who deride this characterization say (funny, true) things like "Batman's superpower is being more badassed than anyone else" and "Batman's true power is being a massive dick." I, personally, like the idea of a Bruce Wayne who's idly given some thought to what he'd do if for some reason all his superpowered friends went bad. I don't, personally, like the idea of a Batman who's actually developed plans for how he'd defeat Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, The Green Lantern, and all the rest. It's a little too much like the idea that the US continues to maintain plans for invading Canada - you know, just in case.
So who's the "real" Batman? Even as a fictional character, there isn't a "real" Batman in the way that there's a "real" Sherlock Holmes or a "real" Quentin Compson or whomever. That the Batman portrayed in one movie or the other doesn't match the reviewer's conception of the who the character is cannot be considered a failure of the film. There is no Ür-Batman to compare to, so the films' portrayals must be considered on their own merits as they relate to their own goals.
* Some, maybe lots, of people don't like this idea either, considering it part and parcel of the unpleasant notion that Bruce Wayne is the mask and the real man is the psycho vigilante who roams the streets dealing out nonlethal but highly unpleasant violence. I'm OK with it as long as it's not pushed too hard; the Joker is enough irredeemable psychopath for one story. Someone suggested a storyline where while investigating a murder a young detective never finds out that Bruce Wayne is Batman but does find out that Wayne's actually got his fingers all over Gotham in highly questionable ways, with the implication that Wayne's real goal isn't an ethically questionable and practically unreasonable quest to end crime, but an ethically questionable and practically achievable quest to turn Gotham into the sort of city that no longer needs a Batman. It's a neat idea. I like my Bruce Wayne pretty much how Christian Bale presents him in Batman Begins - clearly not 100% psychologically healthy, but a man doing constant war with his demons, never consumed by them.
I haven't yet seen The Dark Knight. I very very much want to. I want to enjoy it to a degree that's almost painful and probably guarantees disappointment; the last film I wanted to see this badly, The Departed, was a monumental let down because, basically, it wasn't the best movie I'd ever seen. It's a good, strong film, but it should have been my favorite movie of all time (that cast, that setting, that subject matter, that director). What I do want to express to the void, here, are two reactions I have to the cycle of reading online reviews and then reading comments on them.
(1) You cannot post a negative review of the movie, even a mildly critical one, without being flooded by, literally, dozens to hundreds of comments, about half of them anonymous, from people who by and large have never previously commented on your blog. It's really upsetting, especially because these comments so routinely whirl around nothing but insult and idiocy. If you wrote a negative review of the movie it's because you're trying to get attention for being contrary, or because you know nothing about film and aren't qualified to be a reviewer, possibly both. It's also quite likely that you abused your thesaurus in the composition of your "review" and aren't aware that masturbating over the dictionary doesn't constitute film criticism.
You think I'm joking about the characterization here; I'm not. This is the clearest example yet of the various iterations of the equation that "normal person + opinion + internet + anonymity = fuckwad."
(2) Many of the reviews evince some levels of ignorance about Batman or the history of the character and his characterization. There are a lot of reviews which seem to question the darkness of the film (often in relation to the question I'm still not getting into about the value of trying to make superhero comics realistic and/or take them seriously) or question the presentation of the character. Look: for better or worse there is no unitary "Batman" characterization. The character first appeared in May, 1939, and in the 69 years of publication history since then there have been at least five major interpretations presented in the comics, let alone the tie-in media:
(a) Batman as ruthless vigilante in pulp crime stories w/semi-frequent supernatural overtones. This is the character as introduced in 1939, a Batman who occasionally kills people (!) and on a regular basis semi-advertantly causes their deaths, and is happy to watch them die without helping them (!!!). The comics are crude and brightly colored, but the morality on display here is, somewhat childishly, much darker than any presentation of the character since. I've just bought a book that collects the first year or so of Batman stories; I haven't yet gotten to the first issue of Batman itself, which introduces the Joker, but I'm running through his initial appearances in Detective Comics. In the first ten stories (including one two-parter for eleven different appearances) he: knocks a guy into an acid tank which almost certainly kills him, kicks another dude off a roof, may or may not kill someone when he snares their neck with a lasso, breaks a guy's neck with a kick, kills two vampires, is semi-responsible for someone getting killed by a death-ray, causes someone's plane to crash into a bay, where it presumably kills him, causes a guy's car to crash and go over the side of a bridge, presumably killing him, throws a man onto another man's sword which may or may not kill him, throws a small but heavy statue at a guy's head which knocks him out a window and kills him, allows someone to get stabbed to death so he doesn't blow his cover, and punches a dude so hard that he falls backward onto a sword which had previously been run through a door. That's, in the most expansive counting, thirteen deaths (including the vampires) that are directly or indirectly Batman's fault in one year of publication, which is probably more deahts of that sort than appeared in all the Batman comics of the 60s combined. I'm glad Batman was revised away from being the sort of guy who's happy to punch a guy into a vat of acid and call it "a fitting end for his kind" - the dialogue isn't so much with the goodness, here - but there are dark, dark roots to the character.
(b) Batman as campy adventurer with lots of supernatural/silly foes. This was a big influence on the Adam West TV show, dominated much of the 50s, and this is where everything Batman uses has a Bat-prefix, he's got a Bat-dog, etc. All but one or two of the Batman comics I read as a kid were originally my dad's, and half of those fell into this category.
(c) Batman as the world's greatest detective, in somewhat more grounded stories with a darker tone but still relatively kid-appropriate. The fantasy aspects as such are cut way back and there's a lot of Batman saying things like, "Hmm, this tire tread can only be found on Ford automobiles manufactured between 1957 and 1959!" Subsequent Batman-as-detective representations sadly tend to get away from the investigative heritage the creators, especially in this era, had him share with Holmes and Poirot, and for the past twenty years his detective skills are largely based on knowing who to beat up for information which will lead him to the next guy out of whom he can beat some knowledge. This presentation was prevalent in the 60s and maybe the 70s, and constitutes much of the rest of the comics I read as a kid.
(d) Batman as superhero in the DC tradition of superheroes; this is a thread that runs throughout the history of the character, but probably came to the fore in the 70s, which was apparently (I'm less personally familiar with this era) when the character started being brought out of the confines of Gotham and made more of a worldwide figure. Though not superpowered, this is the Batman who's on par with Superman and Wonder Woman inside the fictional world of the comics, and though I just said he came to the fore in the 1970s, this is also how I think of the Batman who showed up in various crossover, Justice League type titles. Comics genius Grant Morrison refers to this Bruce Wayne as a globetrotting hairy-chested love god. My personal take on Batman is a combination of (c) and (d) with a judicious smattering of:
(e) Frank Miller's Batman, and the semi-regrettable twenty years of post-Miller influence that have largely dominated the character since. This is an attempt to take Batman dark dark dark again. And he is dark - if we think of what I've said about talking the comics seriously and at face value, what happened to Bruce Wayne is superdark, and the decision to funnel his rage into a hopeless quest to defeat Crime in the abstract speaks to some serious mental imbalances.* However, Frank Miller's monumental The Dark Knight Returns - which is not a story set in the DC continuity - is about a Batman at the end of his life, and even Miller himself seems to have ignored that going forward. Batman in TDKR is broken and bitter and nasty, because he's been choking on his own rage for at least the decade since he "retired". There's no reason to believe that this is what he was like thirty years ago, but that's the direction the character was taken in the wake of this story. The idea becomes that Batman is the real man and Bruce Wayne is the alter-ego, and the many voices who deride this characterization say (funny, true) things like "Batman's superpower is being more badassed than anyone else" and "Batman's true power is being a massive dick." I, personally, like the idea of a Bruce Wayne who's idly given some thought to what he'd do if for some reason all his superpowered friends went bad. I don't, personally, like the idea of a Batman who's actually developed plans for how he'd defeat Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, The Green Lantern, and all the rest. It's a little too much like the idea that the US continues to maintain plans for invading Canada - you know, just in case.
So who's the "real" Batman? Even as a fictional character, there isn't a "real" Batman in the way that there's a "real" Sherlock Holmes or a "real" Quentin Compson or whomever. That the Batman portrayed in one movie or the other doesn't match the reviewer's conception of the who the character is cannot be considered a failure of the film. There is no Ür-Batman to compare to, so the films' portrayals must be considered on their own merits as they relate to their own goals.
* Some, maybe lots, of people don't like this idea either, considering it part and parcel of the unpleasant notion that Bruce Wayne is the mask and the real man is the psycho vigilante who roams the streets dealing out nonlethal but highly unpleasant violence. I'm OK with it as long as it's not pushed too hard; the Joker is enough irredeemable psychopath for one story. Someone suggested a storyline where while investigating a murder a young detective never finds out that Bruce Wayne is Batman but does find out that Wayne's actually got his fingers all over Gotham in highly questionable ways, with the implication that Wayne's real goal isn't an ethically questionable and practically unreasonable quest to end crime, but an ethically questionable and practically achievable quest to turn Gotham into the sort of city that no longer needs a Batman. It's a neat idea. I like my Bruce Wayne pretty much how Christian Bale presents him in Batman Begins - clearly not 100% psychologically healthy, but a man doing constant war with his demons, never consumed by them.
posted by medrawt at
18:29
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