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

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

I'm just not sure that Joss is going for that mood, or that that mood would serve Joss's story-telling aims. In fact, since he spectacularly fails to achieve it, I'm going to go out on a limb and say he wasn't trying to achieve it. You can say he *should* have been going for that mood and even better if you can say why that would better serve Joss's story telling aims. But to me the argument as I read it is like saying that Batman the series fails because it doesn't achieve the somber mood of Dark Knight. That's not a fair complaint to make of the series, no more than it would be to say that Dark Knight fails to capture the humorous spirit of the TV show.

Thanks for your kind words, though, and I do agree that Twilight left us in a mass of confusion, and if we're still all confused at the end of Last Gleaming, I'll get out my pitchfork and join y'all.

[norwie2010.livejournal.com]

Pitchforks are so outdated. *g*

Well, i'm not up in arms about season 8 - i surely hope that it will turn out well, or at least ok-ish. And i think there are interesting stories in season 8, too - just that they are told in a very un-interesting way (sueworld2003 calls that an "embarrasing" way). (And that is why i dislike it ATM. But i keep my brain cells crossed.)

Mood, vibrancy, motive - sometimes i really hate that language barrier. Seems i have to up my english a notch or two to partake in serious discussion.

So, let me try to explain again, or some more. What i meant is that Promethea has mood in a general sense, not as in a certain mood , while season 8 ("the later arcs"TM *g*) only has ridiculousness (and no mood at all).

I really don't know if i get my thoughts over all that well. While the particular mood of Promethea and Buffy is certainly different - at least in the twilight arc there is absolutely nothing for me to swing in emotionally as opposed to Promethea (which i oppose on an intellectual level for aforementioned esotericism, but dig on how well it transports, executes) - and that's what i mean when i say "mood": one comic book has "a" mood, while the other has none.

[2maggie2.livejournal.com]

Ah! That makes sense to me, thank you for explaining. I still want to hold fire on things, but I think there's a very good chance that at the end of the day I could say something like "I see and admire what Joss was going for, but I never felt it". I'm hoping I can be happier than that, but I see where it's possible, and why a lot of people think the emotional disconnect is a fatal flaw.