maggie2 | Batman, Batman -- How I do Love my Batmans

Batman, Batman -- How I do Love my Batmans

Batman was my first true television love. Back when I was seven, I just loved Batman, Robin, and their battle with all those diabolical villains. When I was older, I realized that Batman was a spoof and I still loved it. Great that it could work for a literal-minded seven year old. Great that it could amuse her when she got older. Adam West and Burt Ward linger in my heart with the warmest affection.

I loved Tim Burton's Batman with Michael Keaton. Mostly because batman was back and I am and always will be pro-batman girl. I liked the serious tone, along with the cartoonish tone from the original show. I'm not sure they worked together very well, though. I loved that first Batman movie a lot, but more as a really cool failure than as a spectacular success. The sequels just got worse from there.

I really like the new Batman with Christian Bale. Oddly, I've only seen the first one once. It's a bit long and takes itself too seriously. But I like Dark Knight a lot. It makes you think a bit. It's definitely got some of that essential darkness that the TV show didn't have and that Burton couldn't quite blend with the cartoon sensibility..

Folks, these are three very different approaches to the source material which is batman. If you want to take one of them and canonize it and say the other two don't measure up, that's your perogative. But I'd like to be free to like all the batmans. I don't want to live in a world where embracing Christian Bale means I have to renounce Adam West. I want to live in a world that celebrates them both and which recognizes that the source material for batman is just that rich that it works well as serious brooding drama and as spoofy cheese.

Batman and Robin is a bad movie because it doesn't have the zany cheese of the series, or the weird combo that Burton tried. It's not a fun movie, or a serious movie or any kind of good movie. So of course, it's worse that Dark Knight. But NOT because it fails to be properly serious. Batman the series is NOT worse than Dark Knight. It's just different. Difference is good.

To the argument in question, season 8 might well be an abject failure -- but at least let it be a failure of Joss to do justice to his own schtick, not a failure to do something he isn't even trying to do. And please don't tell me that for any given set of ideas there is One True Way. (Or less snarkily, any subject worth doing well is worth doing in multiple tones. Literature is a conversation, not a dictatorship).

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You've just well-articulated exactly what I've been trying to say. Right down the line. I've got nothing to add except that I hope Andrew is OK. I'm rooting for you crazy kids.

Heh.

Course, the natural continuation of the "judge it on its own merits" train is that some people will decide that, on its own merits, it sucks. But those direct criticisms sit better with me than this odd twisted finagling to compare it to something else just to justify why it sucks. It's kinda odd.

I've got nothing to add except that I hope Andrew is OK. I'm rooting for you crazy kids.

Thanks. He'll be fine. He's just gonna resemble Frankenstein for a while what with the massive metal staples in his head. :)

Thank you!

I hope you can forgive me being rude about Batman (Daddy issues I haz them).

I've got no problem if people judge the comics on their own merits and decide they suck. That's been happening for quite a while now, and while I'm not ready to say they suck, I can certainly see why people think they do.

Glad to hear about Andrew! Give him my well-wishes.

Your take on batman made me laugh, and at least you said that Adam West was the best of the lot. That's the batman that got wedged into my heart when I was seven, and I think my fondness for it is unshakeable as a result.

Oh, I know. That wasn't directed at you, specifically. I was just pontificating out loud lest someone get the impression I'm saying NO CRITICISM EVER!!! I tend to think you present fairly even-handed arguments both for and against the comics.

Sorry for the motif/motive confusion, and thanks for pointing it out. In german there is just one spelling for both meanings (motiv) and I'm very prone to such accedents once I've filed a word under "same as in german".

I still disagree about Moore. You seem to think that Moore wants you to believe something or other, but I don't really see how?
Because he makes it very clear that the original world in Promethea is a story too, just a more dreary one, that gets opened up by the apocalypse. It makes sense when you apply it as an opening of the mind but non at all when you apply it to actual reality, the way Buffy does.

In a way it works like tarot,completely silly to think you can tell the future with it, but as a way to gain persepectives and exit your box entirely usefull.

It is in fact the absolute subversion of Lewis classical Rapture, because it reacts as an opener to more possibilities, while in the last battle the characters end up in an ultimately boring perfect world.

I can see Joss subverting Lewis with this in his own way, Promethea, which is already subversion, not so much.

But no matter the intention, it's really the bad execution that kills S8, because the whole Twilight thing just seems silly from the get go instead of alluring (not to speak of the abysmal characterization that was needed to get there).

It makes sense, but I agree only partly. I'll give you the whole apocalypse/rapture thing, because it's not fully told yet. But other parts of the story are complete and they do bear comparison. Not by saying "Ah why is he not Alan Moore" but by pointing out the weaknesses that often shine up in comparison, I'm not saying Whedon should use poetry and esoterics to do his exposition, but something more innovative than Giles bible belt babble. Not even if the whole thing is to be subverted, is it not argued well enough. It's a pathetic Mephistopheles and even C.S. Lewis allows his green witch to make a better case for atheism in the Narnia books.

Edited 2010-07-14 17:51 (UTC)

sorry about the confusion. Sometimes my English still fails me, there's just one word for both meaning in german, so I didn't think to differ.

As I argued with Aycheb, I do think some of Joss and Moore's motives might overlap just as well as the motifs do. His style and method is different but that doesn't make them impossible to compare.

I don't think anyone argued that Joss as to do it exactly like Moore to do it good. But the comparison with an author who brought similar ideas to an interesting conclusio, helps putting the finger on the sore spots.
I resent the argument that it can't be done better and I do think citing books that did a similar thing better is a valid way to dispell it.

I will agree with you if Last Gleaming reveals that all that exposition was meant to be anything other than mumbo-jumbo claptrap. But it played well as mumbo-jumbo claptrap, so I'm holding out space for it to be meant as that. Giles said nobody knows, and it read like, in fact, nobody knows. We're told in the text that Willow is guessing, Angel is guessing and Giles is guessing. So I think it's possible that they really are just guessing.

No worries about motive/motif -- your English is 10,000 times better than my German.

To the subject at hand: I do not mean -- in any way -- to say that arguments that season 8 could be done better are out of bounds. People have a lot of problems with the comics, and it's completely fair to articulate them. It is this one, particular form of argument that triggers my "that's unfair" button.

Based on the wiki summary and what I've gleaned from these conversations it sounds like Joss is the anti-Moore. But I haven't read Promethea so I can't really comment. What I can say is that even when they are congruent you have to say that Joss *wanted* to achieve the effect Moore achieved and failed. And since I think Joss is telling a different story, I fail to see why we should assume he's trying to achieve an effect which he doesn't come even close to realizing. See Gabs' comment below for another pass at articulating the complaint. My own effort to hit the point: If you assume that Joss is trying to do X, and see that he's doing A Very Bad Job at X, it's easier to challenge the assumption that he's trying to do X than to conclude that his writing just fails on this point. If I see cheesy cartoons, I'm pretty sure the creators aren't going for transcendent and magical. I think the burden is on you all to explain why Joss would want to be going for transcendent and magical, and then how a generally competent (if often imperfect) writer would pretty much do the exact opposite of transcendent and magical. Aycheb's account just sounds much more true to the facts than the one I'm hearing from the promethea >> season 8 folks.

But even if it is a mumbo jumbo claptrap I don't think it played well as such, because it's to silly for that.

A dispute between worldviews becomes interesting when both are argued well, but if one needs to be argued this lamely for the other one to succeed (whatever joss has in mind there)it becomes painfull to watch.

Well, we can't have this conversation properly until we see how it all fits together. I'm pointing to one possible space where it works just fine -- and that's if the point is to draw the audience into the same massive confusion confronting the characters.

I think it has the potential to work just fine as commentary about the absence of any greater meaning and our tendency to fill in the blanks with whatever mumbo jumbo suits us. Willow sees epic romance mumbo jumbo. Angel sees "we earned this" mumbo jumbo. Giles sees bizarre this is the balance Watcher type mumbo jumbo. Joss isn't articulating one world view against another. He's articulating a stance against world views. See, e.g. the Daffy Duck cartoon. 'We just make it up ourselves'.

I'm still agnostic about how it works qua story, and I need to find out what 'really' is going on with the universe Buffy inhabits; the narrative confusion is frustrating as heck with such a long gap between issues -- there are lots of ways it could not work. But I think there are lots of cool ways that it could work. Max's point about how lame Zeppo reads if you miss that the hell mouth scenes are satire obtains. It *might* be something like that. It's too soon for definitive pronouncements that it is supposed to be X and Joss fails (utterly) at making it X... especially when X is what some other guy was trying to do.

It is indisputable that Twilight was bizarre and it booted a lot of people out of the story. I'm willing to wait and see, but I think Joss handed out masses of rope for people who wanted to hang season 8 in effigy. But I'm sorry, I think the arguments about Promethea are every but as not valid as an argument that the Batman TV show fails because it's not dark and brooding like Dark Knight. I think deciding ex ante that there's one way to read a story and then to decide whether the story does or does not make sense given that one reading is an unproductive way of approaching things, because I'd think the more natural conclusion is that since the story doesn't work if read in way X is that way X is not the way to read the story. There may be no good way to read season 8 -- but the argument that one particular way fails isn't particularly illuminating.

Edited 2010-07-14 18:47 (UTC)

Ok, it's a bit hard to get into a spot on argument without referencing Moore's material, but I don't think you can say that Joss is the anti Moore.

First off the S4 is a homage to Promethea, Joss said so and he said he loved the book. Second Moore's books hit on similar topics as Joss shows a lot, V for Vendetta and Firefly for example about rebellion to absolutistic peacekeepers and they do come to fairly similar conclusions.

They differ of course, Moore is way darker, often downright depressing and he loves to recreate popculture instead of referencing it, but I find the notion that they are somehow diametrically opposed very far fetched and I just plain don't see it reflected in their works.

To your second point on why I assume that Joss was going for a similar effect. My general assumption about authors is that they want to draw the reader in, that they want you to understand why their characters act the way they do, that when the characters are impressed, the reader should in a way be impressed too, that also goes for situations you plan to subvert later on.

The text of S8 told us that the opening of the Twilight dimension was meant to seem like a big cataclysmic event, but instead it just seemed silly and the impression it made on the characters could only be explained with Glowhypnol for lack of being convincing on it's own in any way.

Even seen as subversion it remains pathetic.

See, I really have trouble believing all of this mess is intentional. Take the sex issue, I do believe it's meant to leave a bad taste in your mouth (similar to depression sex in S6), to come of wrong, but I honestly believe they mean it when they say they thought it was sexy. And here I see where they wanted to go (basically S6, sexy but disturbing) but they ended up in completely ridiculous land.

That Meltzer person called #35 philosophy, why should I assume he doesn't mean it? They voiced their intentions very loudly in interviews, but the actual book doesn't live up to them. So I don't think that the assumption that the whole Twilight business was meant to be impressive too is not too far fetched.

I think we are not using the same lens for the moore/anti-Moore thing. What Aycheb says makes total sense to me. But that's really not an issue here.

Your other ctiqiues are really just fine. I have replies to them -- or at least to some of them -- and we can hash them out if you like. But please notice that you do not once make reference to Promethea. You've just introduced a series of productive lines of conversation to have -- and you did it by looking at *this* text and asking about what *this* text might be trying to achieve. Promethea is a distraction, especially when the issue is launched in a post that made much more sweeping claims than even you are willing to defend. All we are left with is "Promethea succeeds in its own aims; season 8 fails in its own aims." I say we can strike the first and be left with "season 8 fails in its own aims" and get down to business on that.

Hm, I see your point but I can't quite suspend my disbelief that far. Angel, Willow and Giles views don't really seem to contradict itself, so I'm more leaning towards thinking the reader is meant to go with it at the very least as a red hering.

And the whole thing is too much on center stage to be similar satire as the Zeppo Hellmouth scenes. If this is satire the whole thing becomes solely a parody of itself and that would be a sad ending for Buffy.

What I can see is it being something akin to Jasmin land but that too was indeffinitely better done.

Like I said, for me at least it's not like Joss wants to do the exact same thing Moore does, or that he should be doing that, but more that some aspects of S8 are takes on similar motifs and they fail to intrigue.

"The comic, not so much. I stopped reading it fairly early on, but I wish the space fucking issue didn't exist. It embarrasses my over-invested self. Not in a prudish way but in a Buffyverse isn't as deep and wonderful as I have been saying way. Hurts. "

Ditto. :(

To say I've found the last few issues of the comic incredibly embarrassing is an understatement, Sorry Maggie.

Like I just said, I think the solid argument is "season 8 fails to intrigue". The promethea comparison just raises the spectre that Joss should be doing what Moore is doing, and that's not fair and I don't even think that's what you want to argue at the end of the day.

I wouldn't call my proposed meaning 'satire'. I'd say we're swooshed up in events like the characters and nobody knows what's going on. And we in the audience certainly do not know what's going on. Retconning Willow one short issue after she makes her pronouncement about what is going on strikes me as a big sign that nobody is to be seen as the reliable spokesman for the author about what is happening. We can argue about whether that's the effect Joss is aiming at, or whether it's an effect he should be aiming at. But I'm just not willing to say -- prior to Joss's exposition in Last Gleaming -- that I know now that Twilight just fails. Enemies would have failed spectacularly if we left off the last act. I'm agnostic about whether this will pull together or not. I can see why you are betting on 'not'. I just can't go that last step with you of betting myself. I'm too busy rooting for the story to want to place bets.

No offense taken. You've been quite consistent and clear on this point!

Yes, I'm not willing to defend all the statements that were made in connection with Promethea, mainly because Emmie had not read all of it yet either and I don't agree with all of her points (naturally, like you said, it's a conversation).

But that doesn't mean that a comparative reading in itself is "unfair" when there are so many similar motifs explored in both stories. Like any other critique I think it can be dealt with point by point but not as a whole be swept under the rug.

S8 plunges into the comic genre, it rises comparisons on every second page, why should we not make them?

Well at least I'm honest. If I thought it was brilliant I'd be out there singing it's praises like you and Stormwreath. :)

There's a difference between asking about why authors have different takes on a given trope or motif, and using one author's use of the motif as a standard by which to measure the other author. The first is the conversation. The second is the dictatorship. The conversation can even lead to judgments, but they'll be of a more sophisticated sort taking into account the differing aims and so on. Again Aycheb is my model on this. She's showing what the conversation is. You are free to say you think Moore has the better part of the argument. I just think it's unfair to say that Joss fails because he didn't just say what Moore said. That refuses the conversation altogether.

You are honest indeed. It's my favorite thing about you. I'm not singing its praises -- I'm just saying that I'm still hopeful that it'll turn out to be good or even great.

Ok, having this discussion with me is probably a pointless replacement, but I don't think that to say that was actually Emmie's intention, to my mind she put up some comparative points up for discussion, not setting Moore as the absolute standard.

And I don't see the point of Aycheb's argument, because the gist of it seems to be "Meh, Moore uses esoteric motifs in his story, therefor he must be an idiot", which seems a very lacking analysis to me that doesn't allow for much conversation.

What i read from flake_sake's responses here at least partially is that Promethea shows how to do certain things in mood (for lack of a better word) - not in motive or philosophy or what-not. And while it seems fairly obvious that one can critique season 8 on it's own for the failure in mood (drawing the audience emotionally in) it seems also fairly obvious to me to compare this with a comic book that actually achieves this, especially when said reference material is, well, referenced in season 8.

So, what i want to say is that it seems to me that there is a slight misunderstanding going on here (but maybe i got it all wrong and flake_sake will beat me with w stick for this ;-)).

Oh, and, of course, i fan You, Maggie. Thanks for being a voice of reason in a sea of, well, emotional "upside down".

I dislike seaon 8 at this point in time and i do get why people (including me) are upset but i also get your sense of unfairness at some of the critiques. But that's what You get when the creative team confuses the audience - in a very unsatisfactory way.

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Batman, Batman -- How I do Love my Batmans

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