Batman, Batman -- How I do Love my Batmans

[maggie2]

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).

Comments

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Even as a philosophy of literature it fails. Central to Moore's thinking is that the wallpaper pattern connections between different esoteric traditions are significant, that they tell us something fundamental about how the human brain is wired other than that it's wired to see patterns whether they're there or not.

Motive = why he dun it. Motif = trope, repeated element. I'm assuming you've been talking about the latter.

My point largely is that Moore does tantric sex and ending the imperfect old world for the higher plane of storytelling as reality more artistically than Joss because he *wants* it look irresistible where Joss wants quite the opposite. Sure what he does want stands independently from anything Moore has to say. Buffy turning down the paradise where she would be warm and loved and 'knew' her friends were OK? Where she was done? Where she could finally just give in? Where (to quote Spike) the fear and uncertainty stops. It's a temptation that's been there ever since Restless and one she's never been able to face head on, it's always been duty more than desire holding her back, tying her to life. Now she gets to choose. It is nevertheless a choice that if looked at with reference to Sophie's choice completely repudiates it and in that sense subverts it and all the stories from Promethea to The Last Battle where the end of the world is to be celebrated as the dawn of a rapturous (Rapture- ous) new era.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I very much like all your comments in this thread. I'd like to frame the last one.

I'm replying here because I hadn't seen the connection between Buffy choosing to go back here and her huge despair at being forced back in season 6. It's obvious once you say it, and I like that it picks up something that had bugged me about season 6 -- namely Buffy's sense that everyone was OK. I've always thought that was a flag that 'heaven' wasn't an unproblematic paradise -- and I like the development of that theme here.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

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

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

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.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

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).