What Batman means to me.

In a little over a week, a movie is being released.

For all intents-and-purposes…a big movie. A big summer movie by a well-respected director and starring, really, three just-as-well-respected actors. (Eckhart, masterful so long ago in “In The Company of Men“, deserves every bit as much respect as Bale and Ledger will surely receive.)

I and some of my colleagues here on Gone Elsewhere have decided to go “off-the-grid”, so to speak, so as to go into the movie with as little spoiled as possible, as possible as that can be in today’s “Tell me now, tell it all to me now” culture.

I can’t remember being this immersed in a movie’s release since the original Batman in 1989. Even the prospect of Michael Keaton sullying the cowl couldn’t drown out my fanboy, 16-year-old fervor, long before “fanboy fervor” was as strong and marketable a commodity as it is now.

Besides the obvious jaw-droppingly-good job that is being done by the marketing team for Warner Brothers, I would like to assert a theory I am sure will drive much discussion: Batman is the single greatest, most durable and universal dramatic character creation in modern American drama.*

In this short post, I will most surely miss creations that don’t really work in the context of this argument. Many will say that Sal Paradise is grievously missing, that Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and Holden Caulfield should be there and that I’m missing Kilgore Trout, to which I can only say: find a blog or the comments section and explain to me why I am so grievously wrong. Go ahead, the internet is an open forum…I can take it.

Batman fandom started for me when I was a young boy, but truly took hold at sixteen. I was awaiting the film that would later ensure I wanted to do nothing the rest of my life except work in the same business that created a movie that became, to me, more than a movie and existed in my world as something more of a “parallel universe”.  A universe where a man existed who had lost his parents and who had then taken it upon himself to stop and rid his world of the kind of men who had taken his parents from him.

For a sixteen-year-old boy with a rough home-life, that kind of fictional creation ceased to be fiction and became very real indeed. And through numerous, varied, subsequent comics and books and graphic novels, the 16, then 17, then 18-year-old lived with this alternate universe, much like Star Trek and Rush Limbaugh** fans decide to live in the universe created around what they so love to follow.

So I decided to follow Batman, through whatever, whenever, wherever I could find him. I voraciously read Year One and The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns and A Death in the Family and anything I could find with Batman’s name or image on it. I never, however, followed the Justice League. For me, Batman was a lone, solitary figure, fighting crime and trying to secure a sense of closure for himself that surely he had to know would never come. Equating Batman with the Justice League always reminded me of that painting with General George Washington (yeah, I went there) crossing the Delaware, leading this group of rabble, knowing the fate of the war and the fate of a new country rested nowhere but squarely on his shoulders. If he couldn’t get the men to fight, all would be lost. How do you get a disparate group of superheroes to come together to fight all types of interstellar enemies? You don’t. You count on Batman, (a non-super superhero) with his overwhelming intelligence and detective-craft, to be able to steer the team properly, as George Washington was able to do.

Batman has survived numerous attempts by misguided writers and producers to “re-imagine” his ethos, the most famously cock-eyed, of course, being the ’60’s television show. By making him a joke, much like the 1967 Bond spoof “Casino Royale”, producers and writers tried to make him relevant to the times…mostly failing miserably in a “gee, that’s fun” sort-of-way. But where “Casino Royale” was a single movie, Batman had to withstand three(?!) seasons of Burgess Meredith, Vincent Price, Frank Gorshin and Adam West doing their best to keep a straight face amongst the crazy-sixties proceedings. (I often wonder if, like those actors who had signed for Casino Royale, the Batman actors didn’t know what type of show they had signed for until after the contracts were signed.) Of course the James Bond franchise has recently rebooted itself, to very strong affect, by going back to its “roots” as Batman Begins did with Batman. For both, it has worked wonderfully.

Batman has survived numerous rumblings that he is an inherently “gay” character. I don’t have much to offer on this topic, because, either way, it doesn’t matter much to me. So what if he is gay? His struggle and how he overcame his childhood affliction is what’s always mattered most to me. I’ve always viewed the Robin character as the interpretation of all of Batman’s readers who, maybe not able to empathize completely with Batman, could at least put themselves in the role of Robin, helping to counter all that is inherently bad in their lives by imagining themselves helping the Batman rid all of what is bad in his. Batman is a “real” man…one who even needs the help of a young man or…in the brilliant imagining from Frank Miller, a young woman to help get him out of situations where he often forgets that he’s a non-super superhero. In this regard, I’ve also always thought Devin Grayson and Frank Miller had things very-well-laid out. Grayson, who hints at a very different answer for Nightwing, thinks Batman sets “far outside sexual self-expression as a rule.” And I think Frank Miller summed-it-up best when he said Batman “…sublimates his sexual urges into crime-fighting…” and that, taking all things into account, he feels Batman would be “much happier” if he were gay. Regardless, Batman has survived even two movies of Joel Schumacher doing all he can to remake Batman’s image into something resembling a Mardi-Gras party of the most popular actors of their time, (Bat-nipples? Really?) and still come out with, in the latest incarnation, what many are calling, in early reviews, “…the Godfather II of superhero movies.” Not bad for a guy who withstood the onslaught of awful overacting by Tommy-Lee Jones and Jim Carrey and the egregious pairing of Val Kilmer and Chris O’Donnell.

Being able to survive through all of this, I feel, attests even more strongly to his status as our most enduring dramatic creation when, in the face of all of that, come the artists who choose to continue creating stories for him, even after so many have so often…”really made a mess of things.”

From Frank Miller to Alan Moore to Jim Lee to Tim Burton to Christopher Nolan, Batman, unlike many other characters, attracts artists, craftsmen, often those most respected in their respective fields. To continue exploring the Bond/Batman similarities and disparities, James Bond has attracted numerous different directors over the years, but can any of them be considered artists of their craft? Capable? Sure. Talented? Of course…(except maybe Lee Tamahori, who I am still mad at for squandering his brilliant filmmaking abilities so evident in “Once Were Warriors.”) But do any have a canon that can be looked-upon in later years as surely even Tim Burton’s lesser works will be looked-upon as…with the awe-of-wonderment over their artistry and understood as the cinematic works of art that they most surely are?

Batman is universal…Batman, the dramatic creation, has been time-tested and has, so far, remained indestructible. He is our Shakespearean son, the Hamlet of our creation, ready to avenge his father’s (and mother’s) deaths at the hands of, in his case, a common thug. Batman is our Godzilla…forged in the crime of a seething cauldron of a city, ready to lay waste to those who breed the same behavior that bred him. His creators and purveyors are some of our greatest artists…masters of their time…(and in the case of Heath Ledger, a time all-too-depressingly-short.) He has shown numerous generations how to comport themselves in the face of so many different situations and seemingly overwhelming odds. After all, if a normal man like Batman can withstand the punishment he takes from Superman in The Dark Knight Returns simply through HIS OWN INGENUITY…damn, can’t I just hit this ball off this tee? Yes, he may not be real…but I love movies…and I love Batman…as a simple creation and as a character created by supremely talented individuals, a character who exists in an “alternate universe” where a young man who is now an older man can close his eyes and think of a character and his adventures, and what those adventures represent for what he has done and achieved. And no matter what, I love what Christopher Nolan has rumored to have done with our most iconic, enduring creation.

I can’t wait for July 18th.

Vicki Vale: A lot of people think you’re as dangerous as the Joker.
Batman: He’s psychotic.
Vicki Vale: Some people say the same thing about you.
Batman: What people?
Vicki Vale: Well, I mean, let’s face it. You’re not exactly normal, are you?
Batman: It’s not exactly a normal world, is it?

*Please note that I say American drama because I don’t want to ignore all other creations all over the world and because I just don’t know enough dramatic characters to make a world-wide assertion.

** And make no mistake, Rush Limbaugh is Batman to many, many, many people, most choosing not to be aware of the fact that he is, in a business like his, a (mostly) fictional creation promising to rid the world of the evils of the left-wing. Sure, he may believe and adhere to all the things he espouses, but most of what he is is most certainly finely crafted and marketed. He is, in-and-of-himself, a business, and as the old adage says: “Never meet your heroes. They’re never what they are as you know them to be.” It’s all a carefully-crafted creation. We follow what’s been created, not what things really are.