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.
