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'll have to ponder the weirdness of the Willow/Warren conversation. But I think it's in the context of the fourth-wall breaking that is going on all over the place in #34. Dawn with the Ben/Glory thing, for example. I'm pretty sure that if we rake the show we could find examples of fourth-wall breaking that really can't work in-story very well. "It must be Tuesday" being the one that most readily comes to mind.

Without #34 at hand, I think I can put on my Stormwreath hat and deliver the following:

1. We can fix it/ We don't have to fix it. They don't have to fix the lower plane's destruction because they are going to 'fix it' by creating new happier versions of everybody in the higher plane. He's talking high in the first remark and low in the second.

OR He's 100% in rationalization mode. He just wants to stay and will say anything to keep Buffy there. Rationalization probably represents 95% of the human exercise of 'reason' and when people are worked up about something they'll self-contradict in spectacular fashion and not be aware that they're doing it.

2. Warren/Willow. They are both nerdy Geeks who don't always see the whole picture at once when something else has their attention. Their attention in that moment is on the cataclysm going on around them, of which Bangel is a part. So they talk about it. I dont' think you even have to be a blindered geeky type to forget about a lot of things in the midst of the world literally being ripped apart.

How did I do with my Stormwreath impression?

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the best example from OMWF is Xander's summoning Sweet. I had trouble with it for years, before it hit me rather suddenly recently that Joss was "serious" in the commentary when he says, "Just because it was fun." The whole episode is artifice anyway, and artifice that produces strong emotional reaction (and there are PUPPETS! walking, almost singing puppets!); I think Joss couldn't help himself at letting us see the puppeteer’s strings there a bit. And how meta is it that Xander, who is the "ordinary guy" and often the viewer representative, is the one who summoned the demon (WE wanted this to happen!--and we brought doom upon our characters for inviting Joss to our town, and we still didn’t shut off the set!), and then regretted it? Suddenly the fact that Xander waited on this piece of information while people were dying makes sense: it's just a show. The way Joss plays with this cognitive dissonance (it's just a show, and it's emotionally true, and it's distancing, and...) is mind-boggling. And the weird fact is that it WORKS--people are angry about Xander summoning Sweet but OMWF still gets regularly voted the best episode ever, even though almost no one has been able to explain this in a nemotionally credible way (besides, “Xander’s a horrible person with no conscience,” which, while one possible interpretation, isn’t I think the ‘correct’ one)

How did I do with my Stormwreath impression?

It was very good! I actually do agree with the fourth-wall breaking stuff--it was basically the first thing I noticed. Angel rationalizing makes sense, but still doesn't flow well--but that may be the point. To expand on your Will/War point: Willow and Warren also fulfill similar roles in Buffy's and Twilight's camps, and are parallels for each other in different ways (Warren is Willow's dark side, and Willow is...well, Warren is almost all dark side, so I don't know what Willow is to Warren). So there's a lot of meat there, and I don't just mean Warren himself. My point is more that you can’t just say that the story works without appealing to somewhat tortured rationalizations or self-preferentiality. Which is fine--I’m (after several years!) actually kind of okay with Xander summoning Sweet in the narrative and I could see Twilight going this way too. (Though I really don’t think Twilight is ever going to be an OMWF-type favourite.)

I have to go meet a friend. Will reply to other comment soon!