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

[(Anonymous)]

And contributing to my “fan boy” theory is that Meltzer spends #32 making comics references and Twilight plays off fandom tropes re: Bangel, and goes so far out of the way to make things ridiculous as Willow and Warren, who, you know, have both killed/tortured the other, getting into Bangel debates.

So Meltzer wrote some uninteresting and/or OOC characterizations and potboiler philosophy. There are lots of reasons this could work in a grander story. The question I have, I guess, is whether Meltzer was “in on it.” If he was, his interviews are part of Joss' game, and are perhaps partly true. If he wasn't, then Joss is playing his cards very close to the chest, and so he hired Meltzer to get whatever affect he wanted to satirize. Stanley Kubrick reportedly didn't tell Slim Pickens that Dr. Strangelove was a comedy, and so got a very funny performance that probably wouldn't have been possible if Pickens were self-consciously playing toward that; I'm just guessing that that might be what's going on here. That's very ungenerous to Meltzer, of course; and he may really be in on the joke, such as it is. Either way, I think as an outside-the-Buffyverse person he might have had insights into what “fans” want to see, which may have been some of the inspiration for the arc. There are lots of other possibilities as well--it could be that Twilight actually does make literal sense once we've seen Last Gleaming.

The sentient Universe stuff, Angel-as-puppet: I agree. And I like the idea of the jumbled, silly explanations as being all about no one knowing what's going on. (One of the good sound bites in Meltzer's interview, one of the ones that make me a bit more sanguine about his role, is when he says how Giles, basically, has so much information in his head--how is he supposed to know what of the thousands of things he knows are going to come true? Which fits in with Giles being, well, wrong, in spite of being Giles.)

Re: Joss and avant-garde storytelling: I actually could buy that; in season six he certainly ditched the show's whole metaphorical structure (you come back from the dead after facing a god, and suddenly your villains are a bunch of nerds with a freeze ray, a magic crack dealer, a rubber loan shark and a giant penis-monster) in order to establish a new, more complicated one. The cost/benefit there was definitely to the benefit end, and fit with the show's overarching growing up story. I think whatever he's doing here might end up there, too.

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Sorry, that was me!