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]

I agree that some of the mentioned Promethea motives are not fully retold on S8 yet, we're still missing some pieces that make it hard to compare. There are similarities, like the heroine being the one who brings about apocalypse, but while on Promethea the apocalypse genuinly is a step in evolution and a positive event, it doesn't seem to be in Buffy.

Exactly, and I'd bet real money that it's not supposed to be. Twilight isn't a homage to Promethea or the esoteric philosophies Alan Moore proselytises in it. It's a parody, a rebuke, a passionate counter-argument. So much of the Promethea apolgism on LJ focuses on how the sex scenes and the universe expo are better done and more poetically expressed than in Twilight. Of course they are. The hippy tantric philosophy, the idea that Sophie having sex with Jack (Alan Moore's dirty old man self insert) represents a world changing pathway to enlightenment is central to the message Moore is trying to sell (and he sells it very well, I stand by my Leni Reifenstahl comparison if only because Moore would hate it so much). In Twilight it's basically filler. In Twilight the key emotional beats are a) when Buffy, despairing at having brought nothing but destruction to her girls, gives in to Angel's destiny pleading at the end of #33 and b) when she rips a hole in Daffy Duck world rejecting it wholesale to go help her friends back on the 'lower' plane. The space sex wasn't an end in itself but a means to convince the audience that Buffy really had chosen Twilight and it worked. All those complaints that she was no longer a hero, all the slut shaming? People were convinced even as they hated it. Obviously for some the hate was a point of no return (to the story) and the moment of her rediscovering her "me" came too late. It worked for me but then for me the Adam West way is the only way to make Batman's story of one man and his manpain anything resembling palatable. As ever YMMV.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

I have a highly different interpretation of Promethea from you, because I don't really see it as actual philosophy but more as literary philosophy. Instead of applying esoteric patterns to reality, it applies them to storytelling. It doesn't try to sell a universal truth but a universal dream, which is why it did not come off as esoteric crap to me.

And I don't think S8 is a rebuke or a counter argument either. I described that I recognize some motives from Promethea and think they were done more artistically there, the central motive about a step in evolution and so on is the one were I'm inclined to agree with you though, that Joss version of this is very different. But a rebuke? I'm not really sure, because what motive is there to rebuke?

Buffy doesn't want her new world and created it out of dersperation, the people in Promethea break free from old bonds. In Buffy everyone is left behind in Promethea the apocalypse changes the whole world and doesn't leave it as an after birth.

So, while I'm fairly sure Joss is doing something different from Promethea here, I don't think he's subverting it either.

[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).